SAVAGE ATROCITY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 October 1943, Page 3

SAVAGE ATROCITY

COMMITTED BY GERMANS IN LITTLE ITALIAN TOWN. YOUNG AND OLD BRUTALLY BUTCHERED. (By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright) LONDON, October 18. In the picturesque billside town of Cajazzo, the capture of which was announced on Saturday, the Exchange Telegraph’s correspondent with the Fifth Army saw at first hand evidence of atrocities which the Germans committed on the civilian population as they were forced to retreat. Men, women and little children had been butchered with 11nimaginable savagery.

The bodies of townspeople bashed into an unrecognisable state lie in the town mortuary. In the houses, women are lying with their throats cut and their heads beaten in. Twenty-four victims who were buried yesterday include three entire families the women of which all had their legs severed.

One family wiped out comprised a man and wife and four children aged from three to 11. A farm worker said that four members of his family, including two women, were all killed, together with a number of children. The Germans lined up all the occupants of the house and shot them. An American soldier later saw a pile of bodies in the stable. The bodies had been mutilated.

How Fifth Army soldiers had to protect the Germans against the anger of the populace of Cajazzo is told by a representative of the British United Press who says that our men were marching some Germans captured from a reaguard through the streets when women rushed from the houses with bottles and tried to bash the Germans on the. heads. There were shouts of “Death to the Germans.” There was no mistaking that the crowd wanted to lynch the Germans. They were burning with anger at the destruction of their homes and the murder of inhabitants.

The people said that weeks before our occupation of the town they had been afraid to leave their homes because the Germans’ shot anyone they saw. Prisoners included several Poles and Czechs. The Germans are increasingly using these nationalities for rearguard actions in Italy.