WWII Mass Grave Discovered in Northern Poland

“The victims of the crime were shot with a bullet in the occiput, in the back of the head, most of them were young male persons who were 30 to 35 and they were killed by shots in their head, and with a large number of bullets,” the IPN prosecutor Tomasz Jankowski told a news conference.

The site also contains an area where German forces later incinerated the remains of victims in a bid to hide evidence.
This investigation is a part of a wider attempt to record the atrocities that took place in what is called the “Pomeranian Crime.”

The Pomeranian Crime and the Nazi Cover-Up
In October 1939 German soldiers shot Polish civilians and patients of the psychiatric hospital in trenches from before military operations in the Pomeranian vicinity.

And in 1944, fearing the network of amateur photographers and bystanders they had captured on film, Nazi forces returned as part of Operation Aktion 1005 to burn exhumed bodies in nearby woods, in a failed bid to hide evidence of the mass killing.

And while 102 victims have been identifed since the end of the war, many more are unidentified.

"The historic and social context and the state of proceedings make the case of the 'BagatelaCafé' investigation particularly significant," said Karol Polejowski, Deputy President of the IPN. “Most of the perpetrators are anonymous. A lot got away with it,” he added. “Our obligation is to recover memory and to point out who was responsible.”

The IPN, which is calling on relatives of the victims from Åšwiecie and Borówno to testify before a commission or provide DNA samples, hopes to allow identification of the remains and to indirectly pay tribute to the fallen.