Thousands of Jewish corpses are floating in the waters of the Dniester River, in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine, as a result of massacres of Jews carried out by German soldiers in cooperation with Ukrainian bands, it was reported by Hungarian officers arriving here today from the German-Soviet front where they participated in the Axis invasion of the Soviet Ukraine.
The officers, shocked by the horrible scenes which they were compelled to witness, estimated that tens of thousands of Jews were massacred in the Kamenetz-Podolsk region alone from where the officers have just returned. Among the dead are at least 15,000 Hungarian Jews. Last August the Hungarian government deported some 18,000 Jews from Hungary to Galicia, the majority of whom were later driven by the Nazis into villages located on both sides of the Dniester river.
One of the officers also estimated that among those killed in Kamenetz-Podolak region were 8,000 Galician Jews. Many of the Jews were machine-gunned while praying in their synagogues, while others were massacred by German and Ukrainian units in their homes and their bodies thrown into the river.
Further massacres of Jews who managed to save themselves from these pogroms were predicted by the Hungarian officers. The Jews in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine are all facing starvation and suffer from lack of food and medicaments. Jewish communities in Galicia which have been informed of the terrible sufferings of the Jews in the in the Kamenetz-Podolsk region are unable to aid them in any way since the Jews in Galicia are themselves living under inhuman conditions.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
