Nazi-era mass grave discovered in German cemetery

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 programme.
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. 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 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.
People with mental and physical handicaps were systematically put to death as part of a euthanasia programme aimed at "cleansing" the German gene pool of those whom the Nazis deemed unfit for a master race of Aryan supermen.
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 Two ended, he said. Also, it would be hard to detect traces of poisons that might have been used to kill them.
Maass said he would investigate whether the victims came from a Nazi hospital nearby which was established on the orders of Hitler's personal physician Karl Brandt, who headed the Nazi euthanasia programme and was executed after the war.
The local population kept silent about the existence of the mass grave until three years ago when local authorities began investigating signs that there might be a mass grave, he said. Maass said that after the war many Germans had a tendency "first to suppress and then to forget."