The skulls of Nazi soldiers emerge after the explosion of the Nova Kakhovka dam – Corriere TV

Marta Serafini / CorriereTv

It’s not just the mud and the victims of the flood caused by the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam. And there is not only this war to break the earth and life. Where the Dnipro used to be, now mud flats stretch from the Kherson region in the direction of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. And from those marshy quicksand emerge the skeletons of the Nazi soldiers who occupied the region during the Second World War. In the videos circulating on the net, the skulls stranded in the river bed can be clearly distinguished. One of them emerges straight from the sand: still wearing the metal helmet. According to historians, the remains could belong to the Germans who fell in the Battle of the Dnipro fought between the Russians and the Germans on the same ground where the Ukrainian counter-offensive is now underway.

We are near Nikopol and Kamianka-Dniprovska where, at the end of 1943, Wehrmacht soldiers tried to resist the troops of the Soviet South-Western Front led by Marshal Rodion Malinovsky. Hitler was determined to maintain control of the right bank of the river above all in order not to lose control of the metal mines of which the area is rich. Then, in February 1944, the Germans withdrew. In what was one of the largest battles of the Second World War, 6 million soldiers were involved and, according to historians, the losses of Soviet troops ranged from 30,000 to 60,000 soldiers while those of the Germans reached 20,000. According to an expert on German military memorabilia in Ukraine, Oleksii Kokot, while the fallen of the Red Army were buried, “the bodies of the dead Germans were simply left in the fields and marshes” then submerged with the construction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in 1956 Until ten days ago, when a new war brought them back to light.