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IPTC: Caption
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Ukrainian civilians search for their family and friends among the dead, massacred when the Germans and Romanians evacuated Kerch in the Crimea on December 30, 1941. The Germans had first occupied Kerch as they drove on Sevastopol in November 1941. A landing by Marines attached the Soviet 51st Army drove the Germans out. The Marines found thousands of dead civilians, deprived of food and terrorized by the Gestapo during the occupation. Vyacheslav M. Molotov (March 9, 1890 - November 8, 1986) People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs for the Soviet Union, issued a communique on January 7, 1942, listing German atrocities. He told all Allied diplomats worldwide: "According to preliminary figures, about 7,000 persons were killed by the German fascist bandits in Kerch." During the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-1946, Soviet Assistant Prosecutor Colonel Lev N. Smirnov (1912-1986) read statements from Kerch liberators and survivors into the Court record: " After the Germans had been thrown out of Kerch, on 30 December, 1941, Red Army soldiers discovered, in the prison yard, a formless mass of bodies of young girls, naked, mutilated and unrecognisable, who had been savagely and cynically tortured to death by the fascists...As a site for the mass execution, the Hitlerites selected an anti-tank ditch near the village of Baguerovo where for three days on end motor buses brought entire families who had been condemned to death. When the Red Army entered Kerch, in January, 1942, the Baguerovo ditch was investigated. It was discovered that this ditch - 1 kilometer (3,280 feet) in length, 4 meters (13 feet) in width and 2 meters (6.5 feet) in depth - was filled to overflowing with bodies of women, children, old men, and boys and girls in their teens. Near the ditch were frozen pools of blood. Children's caps, toys, ribbons, torn-off buttons, gloves, milk bottles and rubber comforters, small shoes, golloshes together with torn-off hands, feet and other parts of human bodies were lying nearby.
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IPTC: Copyright Notice
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Caption ©2007 MFA Productions LLC
Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission
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