Chilling World War 2 photos reveal gruesome fate that awaited thousands of British and Allied prisoners at the hands of the Nazis
Captured women in northern Germany appear to dig their own graves, among a series of photos collated by author and historian Phillip Chinnery
CHILLING photographs reveal the gruesome fate that awaited hundreds of British and Allied prisoners of war during World War Two.
Women were pictured digging out what appeared to be graves at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, before at least 92,000 of them died during the war.
Another brutal photograph shows the distorted bodies of US airmen frozen in the snow.
Nazi personnel had shot their bomber to the ground over Hanover, before they managed to parachute to the ground in August 1944.
Unable to get to a prisoner-of-war camp due to the railway tracks being heavily damaged by bombs, the Americans were forced to march through the devastated town of Rüsselsheim to catch another train.
But local residents, already angered by damage caused to their town by an RAF bombing raid, attacked the unarmed crew members with rocks, hammers, sticks, and shovels, and killed them.
It was up to American investigators to begin identifying their frozen bodies, and they were pictured struggling to contain their distress.
'LEST YOU FORGET'
These pictures were included in historian Phillip Chinnery's book, Hitler's Atrocities Against Allied PoW's.
Mr Chinnery reveals the horrific ordeals men and women were put through by the Third Reich regime and their Italian allies.
Describing the accounts he included in the book, he said, according to the : "Tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war died at the hands of the Nazis and their Italian allies. This book is for them.
"To those who still believe that the Germans abided by the Geneva Convention and that acts of ill-treatment were the fault of individual guards rather than Nazi government policy, I invite you to read this book and remember its contents – lest you forget."
MASS MURDER
One picture shows dozens of captured Brit prisoners at an Italian camp.
They were grouped together, standing in bitter conditions in front of several Nazi soldiers who were preparing to shoot at them randomly in an unprovoked attack.
Other prisoners captured in Tobruk, Libya were passed over to the Italians who kept them in barbed-wire concentration camps until they could be shipped over to permanent prison camps in Italy.
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Many lived in fear, in case they would be killed at random by soldiers.
Unprovoked and arbitrary killings seemed to dominate the Nazi regime, with men suspected of being resistance fighters in Ukraine pictured lined up in a field moments before they are shot in the head.
In another example of the lack of dignity the Nazis accorded to fallen Allied soldiers, the bodies of dead Americans after D-Day were pictured lined up next to each other, with nothing but a thin white sheet of cloth to cover the faces.
The publication also contains images of some of the famous Royal Marine Cockleshell Heroes who canoed almost 100 miles behind enemy lines to blow up ships in a daring World War II raid.
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