The Jewish Committee to Fight Fascism today started the collection of documents depicting the extent of Nazi massacres of Jews in Eastern Europe and the atrocities committed against the Jewish population there.
Authentic reports which reached the Committee from the cities of Vladimir-Wolynsk, Brest-Litovsk and Pinsk show that no less than 25,000 Jews were executed by the Nazis in these three cities alone. Of these 10,000 were massacred in Vladimir-Wolynsk.
“The collective graves for the Jews killed in Vladimir-Wolynsk are several kilometres long,” one of the reports state. “The Nazis executed the Jews in that city over a period of one week. During that week the city was surrounded by Nazi military units in order to prevent the escape of any Jews. Many Jews committed suicide in order to escape the Nazi torture to which other members of their families had been subjected.
The report from Pinsk states that approximately 8,000 Jews were massacred by the Nazis there. The victims, consisting of people between 16 and 60 years of age, including women, were executed in two groups. The first group of 3,000 was massacred by German soldiers with machine guns on the outskirts of the city before noon one day. The soldiers then interrupted the executions in order to have lunch; and resumed them immediately after the lunch hour was over, killing a second group of 5,000 Jews. The execution of more than 6,000 Jews in Brest-Litovsk took place under similar circumstances. The peasants of the neighboring villages were then ordered to throw the bodies into collective graves which the victims were forced to dig just prior to their execution.
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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.
