Mass grave with Poles killed in WWII found in northern Poland

​​​​​​​By Jo Harper

WARSAW (AA) - A mass grave with the remains of 20 people killed at the start of WWII was found in northern Poland, the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) Prosecutor Tomasz Jankowski said Tuesday a news conference.

Researchers from the IPN, which investigates WWII-era crimes, found the remains of the victims who had been shot in the back of the head, during excavations close to the village of Borowno, near Bydgoszcz.

“These were mainly young men aged 30 to 35,” said Jankowski.

In June 1944, special German units arrived at Lake Borowno, extracted bodies and burned them near a forest located on the western side of the lake, according to archival documentation.

The discovery is part of an ongoing investigation by the IPN into WWII killings called the “Pomeranian Massacre,” named after the region in which the killings took place. The “Pomeranian Massacre” was the first genocide committed by the Germans against Poles. The number of victims is between 20,000 and 40,000 representatives of the Polish elite. The discrepancy results from the fact that in 1944 the Germans took action to erase the traces of the crime, said deputy president of the IPN, Dr. Karol Polejowski.

In October 1939, a month after invading Poland, German troops rounded up Polish civilians along with patients from a nearby psychiatric hospital, took them to field fortifications and shot them. In 1944, German units returned to the site as part of an operation named Aktion 1005 to destroy evidence of the atrocities. At the end of the war, 102 bodies were recovered from the site, but more victims remained unidentified.

“An equally important result of the archaeological work carried out was the discovery of the place where the burnt remains were hidden – as some of the witnesses testifying after the war claimed – even several hundred people whose bodies were burned by the Germans in 1944,” the IPN said in a statement.

“The perpetrators mostly remain anonymous. Many escaped justice,” said Polejowski. “Our duty is to restore memory and point to the individuals responsible.”

Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and killed an estimated 6 million Polish citizens in its five years of brutal occupation.

Poland set up the IPN in the early 2000s to investigate historical crimes committed by the Nazi regime and Soviet Union in Poland.