A mass grave was recently unearthed near the southern Ukrainian town of Odessa. The grave contained thousands of Holocaust victims, in a region that is believed to have exterminated an average of 500 people per day.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the finding was no surprise: “It underscores the enormous scope of the plans of annihilation of the Nazis and their collaborators in eastern Europe.”
“The scope is enormous, the number of places where murders were carried out is very large and that is why even now at this point, so late after the events, graves are still being discovered,” he added.
It’s believed that 1.5 million Jews were killed during the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine, leaving behind between 250-350 mass graves.