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Published 17 Sep, 2018 06:29am

From The Past Pages Of Dawn: 1943: Seventy-five years ago: Mass grave

NEW YORK: A sworn statement apparently explaining the German ‘discovery’ of a mass grave of 10,000 Polish officers at Katyn, near Smolensk, has been released by the Free Austrian Movement (Austrian Action). An Austrian refugee, Ludwig Viktor von Tohatsy, says in an affidavit that the Germans deliberately machine-gunned the Poles. He learned this from Russian prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin where he himself was interned in 1941. The Russians had been forced to bury the Poles. These Russians were later injected with typhus bacilli and those who did not die were shot.

Tohatsy said that the former Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg, who was interned at Sachsenhausen, was forced with his wife and son to work at an airfield and that the son, who Goebbels said had died from natural causes, was in fact beaten to death.

[Meanwhile, it is reported from New Delhi that] razor blades and newsprint may come into India in larger quantities as a result of the improved shipping position. A substantial increase is understood to have been sanctioned in the import quota of razor blades from the United States, and steps are to be taken to prevent the black market seizing hold of them.

Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2018

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