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Nuremberg Tribunal Hears German General Tell of Nazi Massacre of 40,000 Latvian Jews

February 25, 1948
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The Nuremberg crimes tribunal trying a group of high-ranking Nazi officers and diplomats charged with “liquidating” more than 1,000,000 Jews, gypsies and other “racially inferior” peoples this week-end heard German General Walter Bruns, a prosecution witness, describe the Nazi three-day massacre of 40,000 Jews from Riga in 1941.

Bruns said that a “mile-long line of women and children were marched from the Riga Ghetto to a near-toy forest where, at gun-point, they were forced to disrobe. Then they were lined up in front of three ditches. For three days–ten hours daily S.S. soldiers fired light machineguns at the Jews. Fifteen hundred were slaughtered every hour,” he said.

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