The discovery of about 15.8 tons of human ashes means the remains of at least 8,000 people lie in mass graves.
A mass grave containing the ashes of 8,000 people has been discovered near a former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, the country’s National Memorial Institute says.
academy, The agency investigating crimes committed during the Nazi occupation of Poland and communist times said the remains were unearthed near the Soldau concentration camp, now known as Dzialdowo, north of Warsaw.
“It is proof of how radically the Germans have tried to erase traces of the genocide they have perpetrated in Eastern Europe,” the institute said in a statement.
The Nazis built the camp while occupying Poland during the Second World War, using it as a transit, internment, and extermination site for Jews, political opponents, and members of the political elite. Poland.
Estimates put the number of prisoners killed at Soldau at 30,000, but the true number has never been determined.
According to coroner Tomasz Jankowski, the discovery of about 15.8 tons (15,800kg) of human ashes means it can be confirmed that at least 8,000 people have died there.
Estimates are based on the weight of the remains, with 2kg (4.4lb) corresponding to one body.
The victims were buried in mass graves “probably assassinated around 1939 and most belonged to the Polish elite,” Jankowski said.
In 1944, Nazi authorities ordered Jewish prisoners to dig up bodies and burn them to obliterate evidence of war crimes.
Andrzej Ossowski, a geneticist at the Pomeranian University School of Medicine, told AFP news agency that ash samples had been taken and would be studied in a laboratory.
He added: “We can conduct DNA analysis, which will allow us to learn more about the identities of the victims, following similar studies at the Nazi camps in Sobibor and Treblinka. .
