Special investigators in Poland say they have found two mass graves containing the ashes of at least 8,000 Poles killed by the Nazis in forest executions during World War II, which the Nazis later tried to conceal by burning the bodies and planting trees in the grave pits .
Investigators from a national historical institute marked the find this week with speeches and laying wreaths at the site in Bialuty Forest, 100 miles north of Warsaw.
A symbolic grave is seen in Bialucki Forest near Ilowo July 13, 2022, the site where the mass grave of about 8,000 German Nazi victims from nearby Soldau concentration camp in Dzialdowo was uncovered in early July 2022. JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images
From March 1944, the bodies that the occupying Nazis had secretly buried in the forest were “taken out, burned and pulverized to prevent this crime from ever becoming known, to prevent anyone from taking responsibility for it,” said Karol Nawrocki. said the head of the Institute of National Remembrance on Wednesday.
“Those efforts were unsuccessful,” Nawrocki said.
The Nazis used other inmates, mostly Jews, to do the cover-up. These inmates were also killed.
Institute experts said at least 17 tons of ashes were found in two pits that are 10 feet deep, meaning the remains of at least 8,000 people are buried there.
The victims were mostly inmates of the Nazi German prison camp Soldau in the Polish town of Dzialdowo, who were executed in the forest between 1940 and 1944, the experts said. An estimated 30,000 people, mostly Polish elites, military, resistance fighters and Jews, were inmates of the camp and a large number of them were killed or died in the Nazi extermination plan.
The forest was known to be the burial place of the killed prisoners, but the exact location of the mass graves and the number of victims were not known until now. The institute’s archaeologists and anthropologists located the two mass graves this month.
The institute investigates Nazi crimes and also communist crimes against Poles and has the power to press charges against the suspects if they are still alive.
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