The mummified body of a World War I soldier has been found frozen in a glacier on an Italian ski resort.

Dino De Bernardin made the grim find as he walked in mountains close to his home, which had been the scene of bitter fighting between Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops between 1915 and 1917.

At an altitude of 2,800metres, his attention was drawn to a ‘bundle of rags’ that he saw emerging from the melting ice.

When he went to investigate, he was shocked to find the soldier’s skeleton complete with rotting boots.

Police were called to the scene just below a cable car station at Serauta close to Canazei in the Marmolada mountain range of the Dolomites in north-east Italy. Close to the border with Austria, the area is a popular ski resort in the winter.

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The family of a soldier who fought in the first world war have been reuinited with the medal he threw away in digust nearly 90 years ago.

Thomas Swan apparently hurled his British War Medal out of a train window soon after being presented with it in 1921 as he wanted to forget the horror of the trenches.

Mr Swan, a father-of-four, worked as a milkman in north London after the war and rarely talked about his experiences in northern France before he died aged 55 in 1935

He is thought to have been sickened by his military service as he had been deemed unfit to fight and ordered to bury thousands of dead servicemen.

The medal lay undisturbed until it was found in November 1999 by Bob Sheppard, who was out with his metal detector in a field close to the railway line in Betchworth, Surrey.

He cleaned it up and saw that it was inscribed as having belonged to Private Thomas Swan who served in the Queen’s Regiment.

Mr Sheppard, 62, of Crawley, West Sussex, then spent a fruitless 11 years trying to find any family of Mr Swan so he could give them the medal.

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The BBC has posted a collection of poignant photographs showing some of the 6,000 personal artifacts that were recovered from WWI mass graves in Fromelles, France.

More than 6,000 artefacts were recovered with the bodies of 250 Australian and British World War I soldiers at Pheasant Wood in the French village of Fromelles. they include this Bible page with passages underlined.

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The bodies of over 400 troops buried in a mass grave in Northern France will get the heroe’s burial they deserve.

Twelve men from the Cameron Highlanders, with 15 soldiers with Scottish connections, are among the 400 Australian and British troops exhumed from their World War I resting place in a five-month operation, which ended in September.

They will now, in February, be given an individual service and burial with full military honours in marked, but unnamed graves, in a new £1.5million cemetery.

A memorial to the fallen heroes will be unveiled on July 19, the 94th anniversary of the Battle of Fromelles, in which more than 7,000 British and Australian troops were killed, wounded or taken prisoner in a disastrous 24 hours.

The bodies of the fallen were taken by the Germans to sites behind their lines and buried in pits. These were discovered in the 1920s during official post-war burial campaigns, leading to their re-interment by the then Imperial War Graves Commission.

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I think this is the third or fourth story I have posted about what lies behind Hitler’s hatred for the Jews.

“The core of his hatred lies at the defeat of Germany in WW1,” said Mr Riecker, “where Hitler blamed the Jews for defeat of the country, the collapse of the monarchy and the ruination of millions”.

Dr Riecker discounts previously held theories that Hitler began hating the Jews because a Jewish doctor called Eduard Bloch unsuccessfully treated his mother Klara.

He added: “Adolf Hitler loved only two things in his life: his mother and the ‘German Reich’.

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