Berlin – Jewish Group Calls For More Checks at Suspected Massacre Site

Berlin – Germany’s national Jewish body called Sunday for a resumption of excavations at a site near Berlin where a three-week search for the remains of 753 Jews murdered in 1945 has proved fruitless. The dig at Jamlitz, close to a concentration camp site, was called off on Thursday after no human remains could be found.

Peter Fischer of the Central Council of Jews in Germany said, “The place where the SS thugs committed the crime is sacred because it is soil drenched in blood. That is why the excavations must resume.”

German history officials spent three weeks digging up the area. Joerg Schoenbohm, interior minister of Brandenburg state, said Thursday a search would resume later.

The 5,000-square-metre area in Jamlitz, on the outskirts of Berlin, had been thought to be the mass grave of 753 Jewish inmates of Lieberose subsidiary camp, shot by the Nazis in February 1945, Potsdam’s interior ministry said.

The excavations only become possible after years of legal wranglings with the landowner were resolved.

The site, run from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was used from 1943 to 1945. The Nazi guards, part of the paramilitary SS, murdered 1,342 sickly inmates, most of them Jews from Hungary, in 1945 to prevent their liberation by the advancing Red Army.

Later, remains of 589 were found, but the rest of the bodies have never been traced.