Menden-Barge, Germany - Nazi-Era Mass Grave Discovered in Cemetery

Menden-Barge, Germany - German authorities 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, the exhumation process is still under way.

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, and three of the children showed signs of having physical handicaps, Maass said.

During Adolf Hitler's 12-year rule, which ended with the Nazi leader's suicide in 1945, he oversaw the mass slaughter of six million Jews and other minorities across Germany and Europe, and people with mental and physical handicaps were systematically put to death as part of a euthanasia program aimed at "cleansing" the German gene pool of those whom the Nazis deemed unfit for a master race of Aryan.