During World War II, Axis-allied Romanian troops occupying Transnistria claimed to have discovered in April–August 1943 a mass grave on a lot of 1,000 square meters in Tatarka, near Odessa. Allegedly, 42 separate common graves of several dozen bodies each were identified, containing ca. 3,500 bodies, of which 516 were exhumed, studied, and buried in cemetery before the region became a front line. The Romanians claimed that among the dead were persons arrested in the Moldavian ASSR in 1938-1940, and in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in 1940-1941.