Palmiry massacre

• 1. Nazi Occupation Prelude

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  Warsaw surrendered to the Wehrmacht armies on the 28th of September 1939. Three days later members of Einsatzgruppe IV led by SS-Brigadeführer Lothar Beutel entered the city. They immediately conducted a search in public and private buildings, as well as mass arrests. On the 8th of October 1939 about 354 Polish teachers and catholic priests were detained because occupational authorities assumed that they are full of Polish chauvinism and created an enormous danger for public order. Soon Warsaw's prisons and detention centers Pawiak, Mokotów Prison, the Central Detention Center at Daniłowiczowska Street, the cellars of the Gestapo headquarter on 25 Szucha Avenue were full of inmates. Many of the prisoners were deported to Nazi concentration camps. Many others were murdered. In the first months of German occupation political prisoners from Warsaw were secretly executed in the back of the Polish parliament building complex at Wiejska Street. Between October 1939 and April 1940 several hundred people were murdered in this place. However Nazi German police authorities soon realized that they would not be able to keep executions secret if they were conducted in the very center of a large city. It was decided that henceforth mass executions would be carried out in the small forest glade in Kampinos Forest, located near the villages of Palmiry and Pociecha.

• 2. Modus Operandi And Methods

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  Executions in Palmiry were carried out by the members of the Ordnungspolizei or by the soldiers of the regimental staff and the first squadron of the 1st SS Death's Head Cavalry Regiment which was quartered in Warsaw. They were overseen by Gestapo officers led by the SD and Sicherheitspolizei Commander in Warsaw, SS-Standartenführer Josef Meisinger. In every case mass executions in Palmiry were prepared in a careful manner. Mass graves were always dug a few days before the planned execution. Usually it was done by the Arbeitsdienst unit which was quartered in Łomna or by Hitlerjugend members who camped near Palmiry. In most cases the graves were shaped like a ditch and were more than long and deep. Sometimes, for smaller groups of convicts or for individual victims, irregularly shaped graves were prepared, similar to natural terrain landslides or to explosion craters. The glade where executions took place was soon enlarged by tree-cutting. On the day of planned execution Polish forestry workers always received a day off. In the meantime German police undertook intensive patrolling near the glade and in the surrounding forest. Victims were transported to the place of execution by trucks. Usually they were brought from Pawiak prison, rarely from Mokotów Prison. SS soldiers tried to convince their victims that they are going to transfer them to another prison or to a concentration camp. For this reason, death transports were usually formed at dusk and prisoners were allowed to take their belongings with them. Sometimes before departure convicts received an additional food ration and they were given back their documents from the prison's depository. Initially, these methods were so effective that the prisoners were not aware of the fate awaiting them. Later, when the truth about what was happening in Palmiry spread through Warsaw, some victims tried to throw short letters or small belongings from the trucks, in hopes that in this way they would be able to inform their families about their fate. During postwar exhumation some bodies were found with a card reading Executed in Palmiry, written by the victims shortly before their death. At the glade the prisoners' bags were taken but they were permitted to keep their documents and small belongings. Jews left on the yellow Star of David they were forced to wear as a badge under Nazi occupation; and people who worked in Pawiak's infirmary were found still wearing their badges with the Red Cross symbol. Sometimes prisoners' hands were tied and their eyes blindfolded. The victims were then taken to the edge of the grave and executed by machine gun fire. Sometimes victims were forced to hold a long pole or ladder behind their back. Such supports were later lowered so that the bodies fell into the grave in an even layer. Postwar exhumation proved that the wounded victims were sometimes buried alive. SS and OrPo members photographed the executions until it was forbidden by the SS-Standartenführer Meisinger, as happened on the 3rd of May 1940. After the execution was finished, the graves were filled in, covered with moss and needles, and then planted over with young pine trees. Families of the victims were later informed by the Nazi authorities that their relatives had died from natural causes.

• 3. Timeline Of Executions 1939 To 1940

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  Probably the first executions in the forest glade near Palmiry were carried out on 7 and the 8th of December 1939, when 70 and 80 people were murdered, respectively. According to the Wehrmacht soldiers who guarded a nearby ammunition warehouse, all the victims were Jewish. The next execution was conducted on the 14th of December 1939 when 46 people were shot dead. At least some of the victims came from Pruszków. Among them were Stanisław Kalbarczyk, a Polish teacher from Pruszków, and two unidentified women. In January and February 1940 the Gestapo infiltrated and crushed the underground organization Polska Ludowa Akcja Niepodległościowa (PLAN). On the 14th of January, the PLAN commander, Kazimierz Andrzej Kott, escaped from the Gestapo headquarters at 25 Szucha Avenue. Soon after, several hundred people were arrested in Warsaw, among them 255 leading Jewish intellectuals. On the 21st of January about 80 hostages, including two women, were executed in Palmiry. Among the victims were Fr. Marceli Nowakowski and 36 Jews including attorney Ludwik Dyzenhaus, dentist Franciszek Sturm and chess master Dawid Przepiórka. Another 118 people arrested after Kott's escape, mostly Jews, were probably murdered in Palmiry in the first months of 1940. According to Maria Wardzyńska, about 40 inhabitants of Zakroczym were also executed in Palmiry in January 1940. Among them was the mayor of Zakroczym, Tadeusz Henzlich. The next mass execution in Palmiry was carried out on the 26th of February 1940. In retaliation for the death of the German mayor of Legionowo, who had been assassinated two days earlier by unknown perpetrators, about 190 people were murdered at the glade of death. Among the victims were six women. In most cases the victims of this execution came from Legionowo or from surrounding localities. On the night of the 28th of March 1940, German police officers entered the house at Sosnowa Street in Warsaw where Józef Bruckner, commander of the underground organization Wilki, had his conspiratorial flat. Bruckner and his aide opened fire on the policemen, and after a brief fight, they escaped from the building. In retaliation, the Germans arrested 34 Polish men who lived in this building aged 17 to 60. All of them were murdered in Palmiry on the 23rd of April 1940. On the 2nd of April 1940, about 100 inmates of Pawiak and Mokotów prisons were murdered in Palmiry. The execution was conducted in retaliation for the assassination of two German soldiers in Warsaw. Among the victims were Fr. Jan Krawczyk, Bogumił Marzec, Stefan Napierski, Bohdan Offenberg, Zbigniew Rawicz-Twaróg, Jacek Szwemin, and 27 women. According to Polish historians, between 700 and 900 people were executed in Palmiry from December 1939 until April 1940.

• 4. The AB-Aktion Elite Purge

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  In the spring of 1940, the highest NSDAP and SS authorities in the General Government decided to conduct a wide-ranging police operation aimed at the extermination of the Polish political, cultural, and social elite. The mass murder of Polish politicians, intellectuals, artists, social activists, as well as people suspected of potential anti-Nazi activity, was seen as a preemptive measure to keep the Polish resistance scattered and to prevent the Poles from revolting during the planned German invasion of France. This operation was given the code name AB-Aktion. It officially lasted from May to July 1940 and claimed at least 6500 lives. At the end of March 1940, Warsaw and surrounding cities were hit by a wave of arrests. During the next two months, hundreds of Polish intellectuals and prewar politicians were detained and imprisoned in Pawiak. On the 20th of April, the Gestapo arrested 42 Polish attorneys in the building of Warsaw's Chamber of Attorneys. On the 10th of May, occupants detained over a dozen Polish school headmasters who, despite the German interdict, had closed their school on the 3rd of May Constitution Day. The frequency and number of executions in Palmiry increased with the beginning of AB-Aktion. The first mass execution conducted in Palmiry in the course of AB-Aktion took place on the 14th of June 1940. About 20 people were murdered on that day, among them Polish historian Karol Drewnowski and his son Andrzej. The best-documented massacre took place on 20, the 21st of June 1940 when three transports with 358 inmates were sent from Pawiak to the place of execution near Palmiry. Among the victims were Maciej Rataj, Mieczysław Niedziałkowski, Halina Jaroszewiczowa, Henryk Brun, Janusz Kusociński, Feliks Zuber, Tomasz Stankiewicz, Jan Wajzer, Stefan Kwiatkowski, Władysław Dziewałtowski-Gintowt, Edmund Grabowski, Stanisław Jezierski, Józef Krasuski, Jerzy Niżałowski, Józef Starzewski, Wacław Tyrchowski, Stanisław Beer, Jadwiga Fuks, Maria Witkowska, Agnieszka Dowbor-Muśnicka, Grzegorz Krzeczkowski, Tadeusz Lipkowski, and others.

• 5. Postwar Exhumation And Identification

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  After the war, the Polish Red Cross, supported by the Chief Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, began the search and exhumation process in Palmiry. The work was carried out between the 25th of November and the 6th of December 1945, and later from the 28th of March until the first months of summer 1946. Thanks to Adam Herbański and his subordinates from the Polish Forest Service, who in the years of occupation were risking their own lives to mark the places of execution, Polish investigators were able to find 24 mass graves. More than 1700 corpses were exhumed, but only 576 of them were identified. Later Polish historians were able to identify the names of another 480 victims. It is possible that some graves still lie undiscovered in the forest near Palmiry. In 1948 the forest glade near Palmiry was transformed into a war cemetery and a mausoleum. Victims of Nazi terror whose bodies were found in some other places of execution within the so-called Warsaw Death Ring were also buried in the Palmiry cemetery. Altogether, approximately 2204 people are buried there. In 1973, the Palmiry National Memorial Museum, a branch of the Museum of Warsaw, was created in Palmiry.

• 6. Memorialization And Legacy

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  Fr. Zygmunt Sajna, who was murdered in Palmiry on the 17th of September 1940, is one of the 108 Polish Martyrs of World War II beatified on the 13th of June 1999 by Pope John Paul II. Fr. Kazimierz Pieniążek, another victim of the Palmiry massacre, has been accorded the title of Servant of God. He is currently one of the 122 Polish martyrs of the Second World War included in the beatification process initiated in 1994. Palmiry has become, as Richard C. Lukas puts it, one of the most notorious places of mass executions in Poland. It is also one of the most famous sites of Nazi crimes in Poland. Along with the Katyn Forest it became a symbol of the martyrdom of the Polish intelligentsia during the Second World War. In 2011 Polish president Bronisław Komorowski said that Palmiry is to some extent the Warsaw Katyn.

• 7. War Crimes Trials And Justice

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  Some of the Palmiry murderers were brought to justice. Ludwig Fischer, governor of Warsaw district in 1939, 1945, and SS-Standartenführer Josef Meisinger, who occupied the post of SD and SiPo Commander in Warsaw in years 1939, 1941, were arrested after the war by Allied forces and handed over to the Polish authorities. Their trial took place between the 17th of December 1946 and the 24th of February 1947. On the 3rd of March 1947, the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw condemned both of them to death. Meisinger and Fischer were hanged in Mokotów Prison in March 1947. SS-Gruppenführer Paul Moder, SS and Police Leader in Warsaw district in 1940, 1941, was killed in action on the Eastern Front in February 1942.