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KG Erwin -> The Peschanka Bone Fields: Did/Do They Exist? (3/16/2007 1:44:11 AM)
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There was a topic on the Armchair General forum on "Still Horrifying Battlefields", and this is where I first heard of this battlefield near Stalingrad. It is mentioned in Donovan Webster's book, "Aftermath: The Remnants of War".
A commentary on another site is quoted here (also see http://www.quikmaneuvers.com/stalingrads_red_army_secret.html ) :
"In the early 1990s, Walter Seledec of the Austrian Television Network visited Volgagrad/Stalingrad to see where the fifty thousand Austrian members of the destroyed German 6th Army had died and were buried. It is a place where the grass didn't grow for a year after the battle; where run-offs after the winter thaw, for over a year after the battle, were still pink with the blood of the dead.Until 1989, the Stalingrad battlefield and hundreds more World War II battlefields within the Soviet Union had been deemed 'sensitive areas,' closed to foreign visitors. Sedelec was there visiting in 1980-81. He stood where the, '...contours of former trenches and dirt bunkers (are) still recognizable.'Seledec drove an hour across the battlefield to a site near the town of Peschanka. In shock he stopped his car and got out. There he was astounded to see that, '...the balki, the gullies and slopes of the steppes, were littered with sun-bleached bones.'
Walter Seledec described the horror: 'There you are, standing beside an open field, and you are confronted with things you cannot believe, things you have never seen in your life, things you would not think possible in this day and age. There in the open fields, all the way to the horizon, are the skeletons of human beings, just lying there in the open fields. I dont mean a few. There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands...Human remains lying in the fields. Human skeletons as far as the eye can see.'
The many photographs that Seledec took have preserved the horror for all time. In those photographs, '...(to) the distant horizon...(the) surface is littered with the remains of human skeletons--arms, legs, pelvic bones, skulls, an occasional rib...large piles of bones...fragments, shell cases, and an undetonated projectile; a rusted machine gun; a battered metal container...Skulls...hundreds of them, thousands of them, Just lying around out there in the open fields...Skulls lie in helmets, decayed bones still stand in boots, on the spines hang the identity tags...No cross. No wreath. This unknown soldier never made it into a mass grave. Today, he lies on the steppe outside Volgograd exactly as he fell fifty years ago. His shirt and uniform buttons still lie between his ribs.' Such scenes and media coverage caused a furor in Europe. Documentaries were made of the bone fields and articles were written in every major European magazine and newspaper."
I've been unable to find any photographs of this site, or copies of the articles, but in recent years, the Russian government has recovered and properly buried many WWII dead. Some of THOSE photographs ARE on the web. See http://www.1942.ru/photo_zah.htm (Unfortunately, it's in Russian, so I have no idea where these photos were taken).
However, the Seledec photos of the actual alleged "bone fields", AFAIK are NOT available on the web.
These reports/claims are truly difficult to believe. I was simply astonished and horrified, but maybe, just maybe, they have at least a partial basis in fact.
Does anyone have any verifiable info on this?
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