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World War II Mass Grave Unearthed in Poland

The first skeletons were unearthed by construction workers last October. A pit dug for the foundation of a new hotel in the Polish city of Malbork revealed the remains of dozens of corpses, all heaped together in what was apparently a World War II-era mass grave. But plenty of questions remained, and investigators began taking a closer look.

This week, Piotr Szwedowski, a Malbork city official, revealed what they found. "Since then, we have exhumed around 1,800 corpses," he told the news agency AFP. "We are pretty sure that they were former residents of Malbork."

City officials are also pretty sure that they were victims of a massacre. Szwedowski said that one in 10 of the corpses had been shot in the head. All of them, furthermore, had been buried naked, "without shoes, without clothes, without personal items," he said. "The metal detectors used during the excavations found no metal, not even a false tooth."

Malbork is located in a region that only became part of Poland after World War II. Prior to that, the city was German and was called Marienburg. City officials presume that the remains are of former German citizens of the town, killed during the Russian advance in 1945.
Read entire article at Spiegel Online