I often wonder if they'll ever stop finding mass graves from the World Wars. "A gruesome previously unknown mass grave of 1,362 Nazi victims - including 675 children - has been unearthed in western Russia. The dead - all believed to be civilians - were found in a macabre unrecorded genocide burial close to the base of an invading Hitler SS unit during the Second World War, say experts. The victims - almost all without visible wounds - were naked and without shoes when they were buried. One harrowing theory is that younger remains here were from a notorious nearby concentration camp where at any one time 300-plus children were brutally incarcerated solely to supply blood for wounded German officers and soldiers fighting near Leningrad - now St Petersburg. Many newborns-to-teenagers perished here from chronic blood loss. Head of the mass grave search team Viktor Ionov said: 'We are digging and digging, but there is no end to it at all. 'And - morally - civilians are harder to dig out than military victims.' He said: 'The victims were not wearing clothes and shoes. 'Usually something decayed remains, for example soles - but not here.' This week 50 sacks of human remains were taken from the burial pit in Novaya Burya village, in the Lomonosovsky district of Leningrad region. These contained the latest 415 victims - more than half of them children - to be collected from the mass grave. 'In total the bones of 1,362 people, 675 out of them children, have been dug up here,' said search volunteer Sergei Beregovoi. Most of the adults were women, including at least three who were pregnant. There are no gunshot wounds while very few victims show signs of blows, but most have no indication of their cause of death. It is expected more victims will be found when searching resumes after the winter. One tag numbered 1410 was found, but its significance is so far unclear." www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10221083/Gruesome-mass-WWII-grave-includes-675-children-unearthed-Russia.html
