MOSCOW, August 29. /TASS/. The Russian Defense Ministry has unclassified archives revealing the atrocities of the Waffen SS "Galicia" Division, which seized 110 kg of gold from murdered civilians and Soviet POWs in Ukraine’s Lvov, and then sent it to Germany during WWII.

"The corpses were exhumed from mass graves and arranged in stacks of 1,200 to 1,600 bodies. They were then sprayed with tar and gasoline and set on fire, after which the ashes and skeletal remains were sifted through a special grate to extract gold items, including teeth, rings and watches," the archival documents the Defense Ministry released under a new multimedia project show. According to the archives, witnesses said in their reports that over a span of five months, "death brigades" took as much as 110 kg of gold from the ashes of the bodies they had burned.

The SS division raced to destroy the bodies of its victims amid the successful advances of the Red Army as Nazi German troops retreated in panic. "<….> The Hitlerite government and the military command took measures to conceal their heinous crimes," Russia’s defense agency explained.

According to the Extraordinary State Commission, the German occupation killed some 700,000 Soviet men, women and children as well as Czechoslovakian, Yugoslav, Dutch, British and US citizens brought from concentration camps in Germany in and outside Lvov, the Russian Defense Ministry concluded.