Skulls left scattered after Ukraine dam breach may be from second world war
Skulls left scattered after Ukraine dam breach may be from second world war
Mudflats are littered with bones, some of which may be remains from battle 80 years ago near Nikopol
The emptying of the vast reservoir along the Dnipro River in Ukraine
as a result of the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam last week has
left mudflats littered with skeletons, according to footage posted
online, in a reminder of the region’s violent past.
Videos
taken on Ukrainian-held and Russian-occupied sides of the Dnipro where
the reservoir used to be, show skulls scattered in the ooze, one wearing
a second world war helmet. The footage could not be independently
verified due to fighting in the area.
Historians
say some of the remains may be of people who died in a huge battle
fought 80 years ago over the same terrain now at the centre of Ukraine’s
counteroffensive against Russian occupation, around Nikopol and
Kamianka-Dniprovska.
The Battle of the Dnipro
(or Dnieper, in the Russian version) was the focus of one of the biggest
military operations of the second world war, the Soviet army’s
counterattack against the German army, involving more than 6 million
troops.
In late 1943, the focus was on Nikopol,
on the right bank of the river, the site of metal ore mines that Hitler
was determined to hold on to. Today, Nikopol is a frontline town held
by Ukrainians, looking across the mudflats where the reservoir was and
the Dnipro, at the occupied town of Kamianka-Dniprovska and the
Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
In late 1943,
the Wehrmacht struggled to hold out against troops of the Soviet
Southwest Front, led by Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, and they were forced
to abandon the town in February 1944
Andrii Solonets, a historian at the National
Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, said: “The
losses of Soviet troops ranged from 30,000 to 60,000 people. The losses
of German and Romanian troops were up to 20,000 people. So in theory
this video showing the helmet and skull could be linked to those
events.”
An expert on German military relics in
Ukraine, Oleksii Kokot, said that while dead Red Army soldiers were
buried in the ground, “dead German soldiers were just left lying in the
fields … therefore, these could really be German soldiers”.
Many
of the German bodies were left lying in marshes, which were then
submerged with the building of the Nova Kakhovka dam in 1956.
Recovering
the Wehrmacht remains would involve the German War Graves Commission,
but that may have to wait until the current war on the Dnipro has ended.
