The bodies were uncovered during exhumations conducted as part of historical research by a war crimes commission from the coastal city of Gdańsk which forms part of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a body set up to document crimes against the Polish nation.
The remains were discovered in an area known locally as the ‘Valley of Death’ on the northern outskirts of Chojnice, where mass executions were carried out by occupying German forces. The murders were committed as part of the ‘Pomeranian Crime of 1939’ which involved the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of Polish civilians at over 400 locations.
Around 30,000 people are believed to have been murdered in Pomerania under the Nazis’ Intelligenzaktion aimed at eliminating the region’s intelligentsia.
The dead were laid to rest in a special cemetery in Chojnice for victims of Nazism in a ceremony attended by state and local officials, representatives of the uniformed services, clergy, and family members.
A presidential aide said that Poland lives on in part due to the victims and that “as long as we live, their memory will not fade.”
Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said in a letter read out at Monday’s interment that the Pomeranian crime was a “wide-scale extermination campaign against the Polish intelligentsia," the destructive power and bloody outcome of which "no one had foreseen.” He described Chojnice as a “symbol of unimaginable tragedy and brutality that our motherland experienced then.”
IPN researchers plan further investigative work at several sites in the region in their search for further victims.
