German authorities said on Thursday that they had unearthed the remains of 51 people, most of them children, in what may be a mass grave for murdered victims of Hitler's euthanasia program.
So far the skeletons of 22 children and 29 adults have been exhumed from the grave, located in a Catholic church cemetery of the village of Menden-Barge, local officials told reporters. The exhumation process is still under way.
The estimation in Germany was that the bodies were not of Jewish Holocaust victims, but were German victims of the Nazi's systematic euthanasia program. The site of the mass grave was nearby the hospital where Hitler’s personal physician, Karl Brandt, worked. Brandt headed the Nazi euthanasia program from 1939 and was involved in human experimentation.
The victims were apparently killed by lethal injection with poison chemicals emitted from cars. Brandt was at the head of the list of Nazi doctors tried in the Nuremburg trials.
State prosecutor Ulrich Maass said there were signs those buried in the grave met a violent end, especially the children.
"We assume that these were victims of the Nazi regime," Maass said. Supporting this view is the fact that the children's tiny skeletons had been haphazardly tossed into the grave without coffins, he said.
Three of the children showed signs of having physical handicaps, Maass said.
Some of the adults were buried in coffins and the cause of their deaths was not immediately clear.
During World War II, in addition to the six million Jews murdered, the Nazis also slaughtered many non-Jewish residents of Germany, including opponents of the regime and others defined by the Germans as suffering from mental and physical handicaps.
The prosecutor's office will now look for witnesses and documents from the period. Maass said he already had the testimony from a former church assistant who said he saw corpses brought on horse-drawn carts and dumped into the grave.
However, it would be very difficult to indict anyone 61 years after World War II ended, he said. Also, it would be hard to detect traces of poisons that might have been used to kill them.
Reuters contributed to the report