1943-07-21 - DW Nr. 672 Vinnitsa massgraves

Ukrainian officials in Vinnitsa told the Germans that five years earlier the NKVD — the Soviet secret police, very similar to our FBI — had buried the bodies of a number of executed political prisoners in a city park. The Germans investigated, and within a month they had dug up 9439 corpses from a number of mass graves in the park and a nearby orchard.

Unlike the Poles murdered in the Katyn Forest, all of these bodies found at Vinnitsa were those of civilians, most of them Ukrainian farmers or workers. The bodies of the men all had their hands tied behind their backs, like the Polish officers at Katyn. Although the men's bodies were clothed, the bodies of a number of young women were naked. All of the victims had been shot in the back of the neck with a .22 caliber pistol, the trademark of the NKVD executioners.

The Germans called in an international team of forensic pathologists to examine the bodies and the mass graves. The international team, which included pathologists from Belgium, France, Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as from several countries allied with Germany, examined 95 mass graves and conducted a number of autopsies.

http://www.racerealist.com/vinnitsa.htm

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Soviet
• crimes
• NKVD
• GPU
• Ukraine