German authorities have unearthed the remains of 51 people, many of them children, in what may be a mass grave for murdered victims of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.
Local officials said today that the skeletons of 22 children and 29 adults had been exhumed from the grave in a Catholic church cemetery in the village of Menden-Barge. The exhumation process was still underway.
"We assume that these were victims of the Nazi regime," state prosecutor Ulrich Maass said, pointing to signs that those buried met a violent end, especially the children.
The children's tiny skeletons had been tossed into the grave without coffins and three of them showed signs of physical disability, he said.
Forensic investigators dressed in white anti-contamination suits used an excavator to dig out the bones at the picturesque cemetery. They took notes and photos of the scene, which was roped off.
Next to where the excavator was digging stands a stone monument commemorating the victims of World War Two bombings -- a sign that the reasons for the mass deaths may have been knowingly or unknowingly misrepresented by past officials.
During Hitler's 12-year rule, which ended with the Nazi leader's suicide in 1945, he oversaw the slaughter of six million Jews and other minorities across Germany and Europe.
People with mental and physical disabilities were murdered with poison gas and lethal injections as part of a programme aimed at "cleansing" the German gene pool of those the Nazis deemed unfit for a master race of Aryan supermen.