The Nazis may have killed a quarter million more Jews than first believed, say Israeli researchers studying long-hidden Soviet documents from World War II.
The documents, uncovered by Israeli researchers two years ago, include testimony from Jewish survivors of the Nazi occupation in the Soviet Union, Nazi records and Soviet war chronicles.The material shows the "cruelty, mostly of the Germans, went beyond anything we knew of from other countries," says Shmuel Krakowski, head archivist at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, where it is being studied.
"Massive searches after every Jew who was hiding, the many less people ready to help the Jews, a death punishment for anyone who dared help, and organized groups of local collaborators all created a situation where the chances of survival were close to zero," said Krakowski, himself a survivor of the Lodz ghetto in Poland.
Krakowkski says the new material could increase by 250,000 the estimate of the number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, now believed to be 6 million. "However, we will only be certain when the research is over," he added.
"It turns out also that the evacuation before the Germans came was less successful than we thought. And so that means more Jews than we thought were caught by the Germans," he said.
Originally, researchers thought most Soviet Jews were killed by German firing squads known as the Nazi Einsatzgruppen. In the initial stages of the war, the squads lined Jews up at the edge of huge pits, killed them, then buried them in the pits.
It was believed that after the Einsatzgruppen massacres, only the Minsk ghetto and possibly a few others remained. But the new documents show "there were a dozen ghettos left . . . where Jews lived and were later murdered," Krakowski said.
The new documents show ghettos existed in the eastern Ukraine, in Byelorussia's Gomel, in Russia's Smolensk and in many other places, he added.
Israel was first allowed access to the files when Krakowski and Yad Vashem's director, Yitzhak Arad, visited the Soviet Union in 1989. They were then permitted to take the material back to Israel for research.
The new documents at Yad Vashem have drawn dozens of Soviet immigrants to the memorial seeking accounts on their families and sometimes bringing added information.
One Soviet immigrant brought Yad Vashem valuable photos of the evacuation of Jews from Paris in 1941. His grandfather had served in the Red Army during the war and found the pictures at a seized Gestapo station, Krakowski said.
The documents brought from Moscow include diaries, letters and memoirs collected by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee established by the Soviet government at the end of the war.