The emptying of the vast reservoir along the Dnipro River in Ukraine as a result of the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam last week has left mudflats littered with skeletons, according to footage posted online, in a reminder of the region’s violent past.
Videos taken on Ukrainian-held and Russian-occupied sides of the Dnipro where the reservoir used to be, show skulls scattered in the ooze, one wearing a second world war helmet. The footage could not be independently verified due to fighting in the area.
Historians say some of the remains may be of people who died in a huge battle fought 80 years ago over the same terrain now at the centre of Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russian occupation, around Nikopol and Kamianka-Dniprovska.
The Battle of the Dnipro (or Dnieper, in the Russian version) was the focus of one of the biggest military operations of the second world war, the Soviet army’s counterattack against the German army, involving more than 6 million troops.
In late 1943, the focus was on Nikopol, on the right bank of the river, the site of metal ore mines that Hitler was determined to hold on to. Today, Nikopol is a frontline town held by Ukrainians, looking across the mudflats where the reservoir was and the Dnipro, at the occupied town of Kamianka-Dniprovska and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
In late 1943, the Wehrmacht struggled to hold out against troops of the Soviet Southwest Front, led by Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, and they were forced to abandon the town in February 1944.
Andrii Solonets, a historian at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, said: “The losses of Soviet troops ranged from 30,000 to 60,000 people. The losses of German and Romanian troops were up to 20,000 people. So in theory this video showing the helmet and skull could be linked to those events.”
An expert on German military relics in Ukraine, Oleksii Kokot, said that while dead Red Army soldiers were buried in the ground, “dead German soldiers were just left lying in the fields … therefore, these could really be German soldiers”.
Many of the German bodies were left lying in marshes, which were then submerged with the building of the Nova Kakhovka dam in 1956.
Recovering the Wehrmacht remains would involve the German War Graves Commission, but that may have to wait until the current war on the Dnipro has ended.
