Ludwigsburg, Germany - A team of French researchers has
uncovered more than 2,500 sites in Ukraine where executions were
carried out under the German World War II occupation, according to a
report released Thursday.
The team has researched 700 sites where executions by shooting
took place, with the number of victims ranging from five to 100,000.
The total killed - many of them Jews - remains unknown. According
to estimates, around 1.5 million Jews were murdered in Ukraine during
the German occupation.
Seven years ago, a research team under the French priest Patrick
Debois, whose grandfather died as a prisoner-of-war in Ukraine, began
probing the death sites.
They work by interviewing eyewitnesses, as well as by evaluating
archaeological and forensic evidence. The work is 60-per-cent funded
by the French Shoah Foundation.
At the beginning of the month, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre
criticized Germany for not doing enough to apprehend war criminals.
Kurt Schrimm, who heads the special prosecutions office in
Ludwigsburg in south-western Germany, said the slowing pace was
related to the scarcity of legally acceptable evidence 62 years after
the end of World War II.
'That evidence exists only in cases that are few and far between,'
he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in an interview. Often important
documents were missing or witnesses had died of old age.
'We are doing as much as we can,' said Schrimm, adding that it was
unfair to compare his work to that of the US Office of Special
Investigations which unmasks European immigrants suspected of crimes
during World War II.
The Wiesenthal centre, founded in 1977 and named after the late
'Nazi hunter' Simon Wiesenthal, is based in Los Angeles.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
USA
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