Using primer coat get through radio detection and ranging , a squad of archeologist has reveal a tunnel dig out by Jewish concentration camp captive to escape the Nazis .
Archeologists have been trying to observe this historic tunnel for year . Its mouth was reportedly identify in 2002 , but nothing further come of it . Using reason penetrate radar ( GPR ) and electrical electrical resistance imaging ( ERT ) , its world has finally been confirmed .
“ What we were able to do was not only resolve one of the great mysteries and lam stories of the Holocaust,”notedFreund in The New York Times . “ We were also capable to unravel one of the biggest problem they have with a site like this : How many burial orchestra pit are there ? ”
In addition to the burrow , the researcher bring out a antecedently unnamed entombment bit hold the ashes of an estimate 7,000 people . That ’s now the 12th pit discovered at Ponar .
During the Second World War , between 80,000 to 100,000 residents of Vilna — include 70,000 Jews — were killed during the Ponary Massacre . The instruction execution pick out place in Lithuania between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station of Ponary , which is known today as Paneriai . Over the course of four years , residents were systematically marched to holding pits where they were shot at near reach by the dreaded SS Einsatzkommandos . Their soundbox , many of them nude , were then tossed into mass graves .
This form of the Holocaust pre - go out the Nazi extermination camps in which gun was used instead of fastball . Approximately one-half of the 6 million Jews killed during the Shoah were killed in this way .
Most of the Ponari killings happened before 1942 , after which clip the Germans favor to use Jews as slave workers . But as things turn rancid on the Eastern Front , the Nazis establish a unit to hide trace of the carnage . Eighty inmates were round off up from the nearby Stutthof concentration camp , and were organized into so - call “ corpse units . ” chain to each other , they were wedge to dig up the corpses and burn them . These prisoners were held - up in a jumbo nether region at Nox .
Knowing full well they would be execute once their grim task was gross , the inmates began to dig out the burrow . Over the class of three calendar month they chipped away at the shit . On April 15 , 1944 , they made their outflow . After sawing their chains off with a file , some 40 inmates scarper through the tunnel . The guards quickly caught on to what was happening , and many of the captive were recaptured and shot . Only 15 inmates escaped , and only 11 managed to find assistance and exist the state of war .
A NOVA documentary about this extraordinary find is set to air next yr on PBS .
[ New York Times , Israel National News ]
ArchaeologyHistorysecond worldly concern state of war
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