An official report of three trials of high German officers and men for the torture and murder of thousands of Jews and other Soviet citizens, held recently in Smolensk, Bryansk, and Leningrad, reveals that 18 Nazis, including several generals, have been executed for their crimes.
At the Smolensk trial of ten Nazis it was revealed that the Germans in that area had forced all the Jews into a ghetto near the village of Verkhni Sadki, where they were confined for a period of a year, and hundreds perished daily. Witnesses stated that on the night of July 15, 1942 the last 1,500 men, women, and children were taken from the camp and gassed, and their bodies thrown into prepared pits near the village of Megilyanschina.
Evidence at the other trials established the fact that some 20,000 Jews were murdered in the city of Bobruier alone in November 1941. Here the burial pits were filled, then covered and levelled off by rolling heavy tanks across them. In Orel, the massacres started on the very first day of the invasion, and continued until no Jews were left in the city, witnesses reported.
Reports from Kiev, where 15 Germans are on trial for deporting, torturing, and murdering Jews and Ukrainians, state that one of the defendants, George Heinisch, as newly party member, approved the slaughter of 3,000 Jewish children at Helitopel. Another Nazi, Hans Isenman, a member of the SS Viking Division, has confessed to personally shooting hundreds of Jews in the back, and then toppling them into prepared mass graves.)
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.
