The remains of 10 corpses found earlier this month in Vienna may have been Hungarian Jews who perished in the Holocaust, according to a Hungarian historian.
The remains, which were believed to be mostly of women and children, indicated that the victims had been shot at close range.
The victims could well have been slave laborers or a small group of people who were trying to make their way back to Hungary near the end of World War II, according to Holocaust historian Szabolcs Szita.
“All 10 were shot and buried in a shallow grave, where the bodies were covered with lime,” Szita said in an interview.
This was the “typical” way of disposing of Jewish corpses, Szita said, noting there was often “no time to dig deeper graves.”
During the later stages of the war, some 6,000 Hungarian Jews were used in forced labor in and around Vienna out of a total of about 15,000 throughout Austria.
Vienna had three labor camps where Hungarian Jews forced to work at construction and agricultural projects.
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.
