In July, the head of the Gdańsk investigative division of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), together with a group of experts and specialists in the field of archeology and anthropology under the supervision of Dr. hab. Andrzej Ossowski from the Pomeranian Medical University in Szczecin made a groundbreaking discovery - two mass graves were found, in which there are approx. 17.5 tons of human ashes.
"Most of the victims come from the Soldau camp, which was established to murder representatives of the Polish resistance movement. But the Germans also murdered citizens of the Third Reich here. In order for the crime to never see the light of day, in the spring of 1944, from March 1 for the next 6 weeks, the remains of the murdered were extracted from the mass graves, stacked, covered with brushwood, poured with gasoline and set on fire. In the end, the ashes were ground," - said the President of IPN, Dr. Karol Nawrocki.
According to the prosecutor Tomasz Jankowski, the number of victims was estimated at about 8,000 people. This is a breakthrough discovery because so far the official number of people killed in the Solgau camp was estimated at around 1,000. But historians and researchers have long argued the fact that this was probably a much larger number - up to 30,000. The discovery of the Institute of National Remembrance confirms these assumptions.
