Mass graves in the Soviet Union
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Mass graves in the Soviet Union were found by
On June 22, 1941, the German army invaded Soviet territory. German soldiers were very brutal in their dealings with the Soviets. Small units of SS and police, some three thousand men in all, were also dispatched to kill the unwanted individuals on the spot - Jews, but not only Jews; communists, Gypsies, political leaders, and the intellectuals were also killed. Almost 90% of the Jews were urbanized, living in large cities where the rapid advance of the army and the swift action of the mobile killing units left them unaware of their fate, paralyzed, unable to act. There were five stages to the killing. The invasion was followed immediately by the roundup of the intended victims. Those rounded up were marched to the outskirts of the city where they were shot. Their bodies were buried in mass graves - large ditches were filled with bodies or people who had been shot one by one and buried in mass graves. The residents of these cities could see what was happening. They could hear the shots and the victim's cries. Most often, they remained neutral, neither helping the killer nor offering solace to the victim. Yet neutrality helped the killer, never his victim. Frequently, local pogroms were encouraged by the Wehrmacht, especially in Lithuania and Latvia. Before this phase of the killing ended, more than 1.2 million Jews were killed.
