Zaporozhye State University.
The Zaporozhye Regional Centre of Study of the Problems of Jewish History and Culture of the Southern Ukraine.
“Jewish Population of the South of Ukraine: exploration and documents” 1994
(provided by Michoel Ronn , USA)
Translated by Pavel Bernshtam and Chaim Freedman.
State Archives of Zaporozhye.
(Fond 1335, Opis 6, Spr 6, Archive 182.)
The findings of the Committee of Enquiry into the atrocities committed by the German-Fascist occupation army during the Second World War. 23rd of September in the year 1943 in the village Novo-Zlatopol, Zaporozhye Oblast.
During the excavation of four pits in the area captured by the gendarmeria of the German occupiers, were revealed the victims of the Fascist terror.
According to the statements of inhabitants of Novo-Zlatopol, in these four pits are the bodies of those executed by the Fascists and their helpers, about 800 Soviet citizens. In one pit alone 5 x 6 meters were buried 370 bodies.
Here were not only executions but also torture as evidenced on a burnt skeleton.
Mass killing of Soviet citizens began immediately after the German occupation of the Novo-Zlatopol region.
They brought Soviet citizens from all the villages of Novo-Zlatopol region to the yard of the gendarmaria, imprisoned them, and annihilated them in groups of 100 or more people at the hands of groups of SS who arrived in Novo-Zlatopol specially for this purpose. Those who were taken to be executed were forced to dig for themselves the pit and then 6 or 7 people were killed. Each successive group had to arrange those killed in a row in the pit and so more bodies were laid in the pit. Children were killed in the presence of their parents. Small children were thrown alive into the pit.
In order to silence the shrieks of the victims, they made artificial noise by beating all sorts of vessels such as buckets.
Together with the killing there was pillage.