CITY OF THE DEAD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 November 1943, Page 3

CITY OF THE DEAD

HORRORS OF NAZI SAVAGERY IN KIEV 100,000 CIVILIANS DONE TO DEATH. COLD-BLOODED MASSACRE OF JEWS. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, November 28. A correspondent who has returned to Moscow from Kiev has brought back a grim and horrible story. Kiev, once one of the gayest spots in the Soviet I’nion. is today a city of 1 lie dead. It used to have a population .of 1,000.000. When the Rhd Army reconquered it they found only 10.000 Russians left. Since then 60,000 have returned from the surrounding countryside. but the streets present a spectacle of untidy emptiness. There is a notable absence of children, and those who are seen are pathetic figures. As at Kharkov, but to a greater extent. the people seem dazed and uncertain what to do. There is little civilian traffic apart from a wretched stream of peasant carts and hand trucks bringing evacuees and their possessions back.

Though the speed and skill of the Red Army advance saved Kiev from total destruction, there is plenty of evidence of the enemy's destructive malice. Buildings of no special military value, including the cathedral, were blown up. During the occupation, the Germans fed only those who worked for them and gave even them only a starvation diet. The Germans took over the best living quarters in the centre of the city, and the Russians were thrown out. The Germans were the only people allowed to use the shops. The Germans, in short, had no use at all for the Russians, except as slaves. The Russians estimate that 109,000 civilians were done to death or died of starvation during the two years under German rule. There were the usual hangings, shootings, and cases of torture.

The correspondent says one case pales all other German atrocities in Russia into insignificance: The people who were in Kiev in September. 1941, say that the Germans ordered all Jews to assemble in a suburb of the city. When they arrived, about 70,000 men, women and children, they were taken in big batches to a deep ravine and mown down with machine-guns. Russian prisoners of war, were made to cover the bodies with sand.

Two years after when the Germans were in retreat they planned to destroy the evidence of their crimes. Russian prisoners of war were forced to dig up the bodies and burn them in huge incinerators which the Germans had built.

The correspondent says: “The twentieth century barbarians from Germany have left in their path a volume of suffering which will be remembered by successive generations of Russians for 1000 years.”