Poland: The remains of 8,000 victims of Nazi terror discovered – 20 Minutes

About 17.5 tons of human ashes. The Nazi horror has been brought to light in Poland where the remains of victims of the regime have been discovered and unearthed near a former Nazi concentration camp, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) announced on Wednesday. remains were unearthed at Ilowo Osada, in the Bialucki forest, near the site of the former concentration camp of Dzialdowo (Soldau in German, 150 km north of Warsaw), built during the occupation of Poland by the Nazi Germany during the Second World War.Place of exterminationFrom the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Soldau camp served as a place of transit, internment and extermination of political opponents, members of the Polish elites and of Jews. Some estimate the number of prisoners killed at Soldau at 30,000, but so far, historical sources do not allow this to be confirmed with certainty. The discovery of this place “allows us to affirm that at least 8,000 people died here”, indicated Tomasz Jankowski, prosecutor at the IPN. This number is estimated thanks to the weight of the remains, two kilograms of ashes corresponding approximately to a body. “The victims buried in this grave were probably murdered around 1939 and mostly belonged to Polish elites,” according to Tomasz Jankowski. DNA analysis In 1944, Jewish prisoners were tasked with exhuming the bodies and setting them on fire , in order to erase the traces of Nazi war crimes. “We took samples from the ashes, which will then be studied in the laboratory,” Andrzej Ossowski, a genetics researcher at the Pomeranian Medical University, told AFP. ‘find out more about the identity of the victims’, like the studies already carried out on the former Nazi camps of Sobibor or Treblinka, he added.