German soldiers captured during the rout of the Nazi armies around Stalingrad and in the Caucasus reveal almost unbelievable details of the atrocities committed upon Jewish civilians in various sections of occupied Europe in which they were stationed and Russia, in accounts made public here today by the Anti-Fascist Jewish Committee.
In a small village near the city of Lutzk in Poland, one Nazi corporal disclosed, sixty Jews – all those remaining in the village – were looked in a barn, stripped of their clothes which were burned and then ordered to beat each other with iron rods. The next day they were shot. A German infantryman told how a Jewish youth in a small town about fifteen miles outside of Lwow was compelled to swim from one bank of a river to the other until he was near exhaustion. He was then dragged from the river, beaten and stoned, and then his arms and feet were tied together and he was flung back into the river to drown. In a town in the Ukraine, tanks were driven into a mass of Jews, crushing them to death, another Nazi reported.
Jewish Red Army men are subjected to particular torture by the Germans, it was also revealed. Some were compelled by drunken Nazis to crawl on all fours and bark like dogs or “meow” like cats, while others were forced to fight each other and then, in violation of international law covering war prisoners, were shot.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
