UPWr scientists search for graves of Nazi victims

The Austrian writer Martin Pollack, winner of the Angelus literary award for his acclaimed novel 'Death in a Bunker. A Tale of My Father', described the inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe as living in tainted landscapes marked by the trauma of 20th century totalitarianism. Within just a few years, Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were transformed into a landscape of institutionalised terror, creating horrific 'camp landscapes'. A team composed of Polish and Czech scientists will examine some of them.

Research under the project 'Bioarchaeology and Archaeology of Landscapes of National-Socialist Repression: A Central and Eastern European Perspective' will be conducted by an interdisciplinary team from the Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences and the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. The universities have been working together for several years, research for example the graves of the Lety concentration camp victims in southern Bohemia.

'The camp landscape' is an area where the historical memory, narratives and biographies of victims intermingle with the physical remains of their tragedy – including human remains. For this reason, cooperation between representatives of different sciences is required to fully understand it – not only history and archaeology, but also biological anthropology. The importance of physical research in understanding the repressive strategies of Nazi totalitarianism is central to this project.

The primary aim of the project is to assess physical evidence concerning the involvement of the Nazi 'camp nation' in war production and military logistics. Hundreds of camps were closely linked to various industrial facilities and military installations. Two sample 'camp landscapes' were chosen to explore the ways in which this system operated, as well as the living and working conditions of prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates and forced labourers. The first of the areas selected for research is the area around the town of Holýšov in western Bohemia, with the remains of several camps associated with munitions production (including the KZ Flossenbürg sub-camp). In Poland this will be the Bory Dolnośląskie area in western Poland, where physical traces of the KZ Gross-Rosen branches associated with the operation of the military complexes located there have been preserved.

A second, equally important objective of the project is to find forgotten/secret graves of Nazi victims. In the Bory Dolnośląskie area a search will be carried out for the graves of prisoners of the Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp from branches in Iłowa (Żagański poviat) and Trzebień (Bolesławiec poviat). In the Czech Republic the research will be focused on the graves of prisoners who died during the Death Marches in the district of Tachov in early 1945. A similar site will be investigated in western Poland in the district of Żary.

All the work will be carried out using primarily non-destructive methods for physical heritage. The results of the research on sites of repression will be synthesised and interpreted in comparison with archival sources and accounts of further tainted landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe. This should enable the discovery and presentation of elements of neglected materiality of the totalitarian heritage of the 20th century.

Research on the part of the Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences will be led by Dr. Paweł Konczewski. The team leader from the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen is Associate Professor Pavel Vařeka. The project 'Bioarchaeology and Archaeology of Landscapes of National-Socialist Repression: A Central and Eastern European Perspective' will be funded by the National Science Centre under the OPUS 22 + LAP competition, No. DEC-2021/43/I/HS3/02072.

Ewelina Kaczmarek

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