Last week’s major failure at the Nova Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine revealed a horrific legacy from the past. The pictures show how the skulls – some of them wearing a soldier’s helmet – protrude from the mud in different places. Presumably from World War II soldiers.
KVDS
Last updated:
5:23 p.m
It is about the soldiers killed in battle near the port city of Nikopol, eighty years ago. Nikopol is located in the Kachovka Reservoir, upstream from the Kachovka Dam. Parts of the reservoir dried up after the dam burst last week.
Pictures were taken on both banks of the reservoir, on the Ukrainian and Russian sides. Skulls appear, one of them wearing a WWII helmet. The photos cannot be independently verified, because the area is in the foreground.
Four million soldiers
The hostilities at Nikopol were part of the Battle of the Dnieper, one of the largest military operations of World War II. Four million soldiers were involved and finished in late 1943, early 1944 when the Soviet Army captured the right bank of the Dnieper River from the Germans.
Hitler was interested in Nikopol because there were ore mines there and he didn’t want to lose it. Today, Nikopol is again on the front and is in the hands of the Ukrainian forces.
In total, between 30,000 and 60,000 Soviets were killed. On the German and Romanian side, there were about 20,000. The Soviets were buried, but most of the German soldiers remained on the battlefield. They disappeared under the water with the construction of the Kachovka Dam in 1956. Therefore, historians suspect that the skulls that have appeared now belong to German soldiers.
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