The remains of 8,000 people were discovered in two World War II-era mass graves in Poland, with signs pointing to it being an atrocity the Nazis tried to cover up.
Investigators with the Institute of National Remembrance, an organization that searches for and identifies victims of German Nazism, announced the discovery on Wednesday of 17 tons of human ashes, equivalent to 8,000 people, buried under 10 feet of earth in two pits near the Soldau concentration camp north of Warsaw.
“It’s the evidence of how thoroughly the Germans tried to obliterate the traces of genocide they committed in Eastern Europe,” the institute said in a statement.
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Investigators believe that at first, the bodies of the victims were buried whole, but in the spring of 1944, they were excavated by the Nazis and incinerated in an attempt to hide evidence of the war crime. The Nazis then planted trees above the burial pits.
“The unburned remains were ground, so that the crime would not see the light of day and no one could be held responsible,” Karol Nawrocki, the president of the Institute of National Remembrance, said. “The cover-up has failed because [the institute] is determined to search for the victims and heroes of WW2 and will never allow even one of them to be forgotten.”
Investigators believe the victims were mostly Poles imprisoned at the Soldau camp that housed 30,000 Polish elites, military, resistance fighters, and Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland.
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The institute said it will take ash samples from the mass graves to a lab for DNA analysis in order to learn more about the victims.
The institute has the power to bring charges against suspects if they are alive.
