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http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/01/21/jewish-groups-push-holocaust-mass-graves-1034182190/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fworld+%28Internal+-+World+Latest+-+Text%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
BERLIN – Jewish organizations launched a joint effort Friday to identify, protect and memorialize thousands of forgotten Holocaust mass graves across eastern Europe.
More than 2 million Jews in eastern Europe were rounded up by the German military and shot, their bodies left in unmarked mass graves, even before the Nazis began to organize mass killings at the gas chambers in death camps like Auschwitz and Belzec.
"Entire communities were wiped out and those few who by some miracle survived seldom returned," Rabbi Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee told reporters in Berlin. Most locals who witnessed the crimes are either dead or very old, he added.
"Only a short time is left to collect their testimonies, which are often crucial in identifying the exact killing site," he said.
The committee along with Germany's Central Council of Jews and the German War Graves Commission will coordinate work by groups in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Poland that are talking to witnesses, identifying mass graves, marking and protecting them and establishing memorials.
The German Foreign Ministry is donating euro300,000 ($404,000) to the project, Baker said.
Several organizations have been working on the ground for the last few years trying to identify the killing sites based on witness accounts as well as German and Soviet historical documents.
Among them is Lo Tishkach, which has created a database of over 10,000 Holocaust mass graves and Jewish cemeteries across Ukraine. Another organization, Yahad-In Unum, will conduct 15 research trips in eastern Europe this year alone to identify further killing sites.
The teams will be "driving up and down the back roads of small villages in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Poland, knocking on doors and asking the elderly ... to recount what they have seen during the war," said William Mengebier of Yahad-In Unum.
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