400,000 Jews Killed by Germans in Byelorussia, Soviet Official Reports at San Francisco

Approximately 400,000 Jews were massacred by the Germans in Byelorussia during their occupation of that part of the USSR, Kuzma liselev, head of the Byelorussian delegation to the United Nations conference, delcared today at a press conference.

“As a member of the investigating commission I saw with my own eyes how thousands of murdered Jewish children were disintered from mass-graves in the suburbs of Minsk, Orsha, Vitehsk, Gomel and other Byelorussian cities from which the Germans are drived by the Red Army, Mr. Kiselev said. He estimated that in Minsk eighty percent of the entire Jewish-population was annihilated during the German occupation, in Gemel ninety percent of the Jews were murdered, while in Orsha practically all the men were killed.

Jewish partisans who fought against the Germans, as well as Jews who have been evacuated into the interior of the USSR, are now returning to their home towns As Byelorussia and are beginning to rebuild life anew, the Soviet representative reported. Dmitry Manuilsky, head of the Soviet Ukrainian delegation at the San Francisco Conference, said that “the German massacres of Jews in the Ukraine exceeded the massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day.”