A Jewish tankist from Biro-Bidjan, now fighting with Red Army troops in the Ukraine, reveals in a report made public today by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee here, that from Kiev down the Dnieper, and westward to Zhitomir, Vinnitsa and into the western Ukraine he encountered no Jews in areas where, before the German invasion, hundreds of thousands of Jews had resided.
“From Kiev,” he writes, “I rode through hundreds of inhabited places along the right bank of the Dnieper, but there wasn’t a Jew left in any of them. Nor did I find any Jews in Zhitomir, Berdiehev, Belaya, Tschekov or Kazatin, or in the thousands of villages and towns we took in the Ukraine. There were thousands and thousands of Jews living in these places when the Germans came.”
At the same time, the Anti-Fascist Committee released the depositions of many captured German soldiers, disclosing the atrocities against Jews committed by the Nazi troops. Details revealed in these accounts – which cover cities and towns from one end of occupied Russia to the other – range from stories which are unprintable to the relatively moderate punishment of death by starvation or machine guns.
A junior officer attached to an infantry regiment of the 227th German Grenadier Division discloses that the usual Nazi method of mass-execution of thousands of Jews by machine gun fire was replaced later by a more efficient and faster procedure. Enormous numbers of people were jammed into gigantic pits, most often dug by the victims, which had been mined. When the pits were packed to capacity the mines were exploded killing the bulk of the Jews and covering any who were not instantly killed with piles of debris which suffocated them.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
