About 17.5 tons of human ashes have been discovered and unearthed near a former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, the Polish Institute of National Memory (IPN), which investigates Nazi and communist crimes, said on Wednesday.
The remains were unearthed in Ilowo Osada, in the Bialucki Forest, near the site of the former Dzialdowo concentration camp (Soldau in German, 150 km north of Warsaw), built during Nazi Germany’s occupation of Poland during World War II. World War.
Since the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Soldau camp served as a place of transit, internment and extermination for political opponents, members of the Polish elites and Jews.
Samples studied in the laboratory
There are those who estimate the number of prisoners killed in Soldau at 30,000, but so far historical sources do not allow us to confirm this with certainty. The discovery of this place “allows us to affirm that at least 8,000 people died here,” said Tomasz Jankowski, IPN prosecutor. This number is estimated thanks to the weight of the remains, two kilograms of ashes that correspond approximately to a corpse.
“The victims buried in this tomb were probably killed around 1939 and mostly belonged to the Polish elites,” according to Tomasz Jankowski. In 1944, Jewish prisoners were given the task of exhuming the bodies and setting them on fire to erase traces of Nazi war crimes.
“We take samples from the ashes, which will then be studied in the laboratory,” Andrzej Ossowski, a genetics researcher at the Pomeranian Medical University, told AFP. “He knows more about the identity of the victims”, as the studies already carried out. in the former Nazi camps of Sobibor or Treblinka, he added.
Source: BFM TV
