Palmiry massacre

• 1. Introduction

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  The Palmiry massacre left behind a strange piece of evidence. During postwar exhumation, some bodies were found carrying a handwritten card reading "Executed in Palmiry," written by victims shortly before they died. Between December 1939 and July 1941, German SS and Ordnungspolizei units murdered more than 1700 Poles and Jews near the village of Palmiry. The killings took place in a forest glade in the Kampinos Forest, northwest of Warsaw. Most of the dead were pulled from Warsaw's Pawiak prison. The best documented of these killings unfolded on the 20th and the 21st of June 1940. In a single operation, 358 members of Poland's political, cultural and social elite were shot dead. Together with the Katyn massacre, Palmiry stands today as one of the enduring symbols of the Nazi campaign against Poland's educated class. How did a quiet forest clearing become a killing ground that operated for a year and a half? Who ended up buried there, and how did word of the killings reach the outside world?

• 2. A Capital Under Watch

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  Warsaw surrendered to the Wehrmacht on the 28th of September 1939. Three days later, members of Einsatzgruppe IV, led by SS-Brigadeführer Lothar Beutel, entered the city and began searching public and private buildings. On the 8th of October 1939, occupation authorities detained about 354 Polish teachers and Catholic priests, judging them "full of Polish chauvinism." Warsaw's prisons quickly filled: Pawiak, Mokotów Prison, the Central Detention Center on Daniłowiczowska Street, and the Gestapo cellars at 25 Szucha Avenue. Many of those held were deported to concentration camps, and many others were murdered outright. Between October 1939 and April 1940, several hundred political prisoners were shot in secret behind the Sejm building complex on Wiejska Street. This site became known as the Sejm gardens. German police soon concluded they could not keep executing people at the heart of a major city without being noticed. They moved the killing to a forest glade in the Kampinos Forest, about 30 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, near the villages of Palmiry and Pociecha. Years later, on the 14th of December 1943, Governor-General Hans Frank wrote in his diary that Warsaw was "a source of all our misfortunes." He added that Warsaw was "the place from which discontent is spread through the whole country." That secrecy requirement is what shaped everything the SS did next in the glade near Palmiry.

• 3. A Carefully Staged Execution

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  Mass graves at Palmiry were dug several days before each planned execution. The work usually fell to an Arbeitsdienst unit quartered in Łomna, or to Hitlerjugend members camped nearby. Most graves were shaped like a ditch more than 30 meters long and deep. For smaller or individual killings, the SS sometimes used irregular pits resembling natural landslides or explosion craters. The glade itself grew larger over time as trees were cut down to make room. On the day of a planned execution, Polish forestry workers were always given the day off, while German police patrolled the surrounding forest. Victims were driven to the site by truck, usually from Pawiak prison and rarely from Mokotów. SS soldiers told them they were being transferred to another prison or a concentration camp. Death transports typically left at dusk, so prisoners could bring their belongings along. Some were given an extra food ration or had their documents returned from the prison depository before departure. These tactics worked at first, and many victims never suspected what was coming. Once word of Palmiry spread through Warsaw, some prisoners threw notes or small belongings from the trucks, hoping to reach their families. At the glade, guards took the prisoners' bags but let them keep documents and small belongings. Jewish victims were later found still wearing the yellow Star of David badge they had been forced to wear. Former workers from Pawiak's infirmary were found still wearing their Red Cross badges. Hands were sometimes tied and eyes blindfolded before victims were led to the edge of the grave and shot with machine gun fire. In some cases, victims were made to hold a pole or ladder behind their backs. When the support was lowered, the bodies fell into the grave in an even layer. Postwar exhumation showed that some wounded victims were buried while still alive. SS and Ordnungspolizei members photographed the killings until SS-Standartenführer Josef Meisinger banned it, a restriction already in place by the 3rd of May 1940. Once a grave was filled, it was covered with moss and pine needles and planted over with young pine trees. Families of the victims were later told only that their relatives had "died from natural causes."

• 4. Witnesses in the Forest

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  Forestry workers and residents of Palmiry and Pociecha heard the gunfire and watched death transports pass, despite German efforts at secrecy. Several times, locals saw groups of prisoners being marched to the execution site. Forester Adam Herbański and his subordinates in the Polish Forest Service risked their own lives to help expose the truth. At night, after executions had finished, they slipped into the glade to secretly mark the locations of the mass graves. Members of the Union of Armed Struggle, meanwhile, managed to steal a handful of photographs the executioners themselves had taken. Those stolen images and Herbański's hidden markers would later prove essential once the war ended and investigators needed to find where the dead were buried.

• 5. The First Wave

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  The first known executions in the Palmiry glade took place on the 7th and the 8th of December 1939, when 70 and 80 people were murdered on consecutive days. Wehrmacht soldiers guarding a nearby ammunition warehouse said all of the victims were Jewish. On the 14th of December 1939, another 46 people were shot, including Stanisław Kalbarczyk, a teacher from Pruszków, and two unidentified women. Historian Maria Wardzyńska has estimated that at least 70 more people were secretly executed in Palmiry before the end of that year. In January 1940, the Gestapo crushed an underground group called Polska Ludowa Akcja Niepodległościowa, known as PLAN. Its commander, Kazimierz Andrzej Kott, escaped Gestapo headquarters at 25 Szucha Avenue on the 14th of January. That escape triggered a wave of arrests, sweeping up 255 Jewish intellectuals among hundreds detained. On the 21st of January, about 80 hostages, including two women, were executed at Palmiry. The dead included Father Marceli Nowakowski, a former member of parliament. Also killed were 36 Jewish victims, among them the attorney Ludwik Dyzenhaus, the dentist Franciszek Sturm and the chess master Dawid Przepiórka. Another 118 people arrested after Kott's escape, most of them Jewish, were probably also killed at Palmiry in early 1940. Wardzyńska further found that about 40 residents of Zakroczym, including the town's mayor, Tadeusz Henzlich, were executed that same January. On the 26th of February 1940, roughly 190 people were shot in retaliation for the assassination of Legionowo's German mayor two days earlier. Six of the dead were women. Many of the victims that day came from Legionowo and the surrounding area. Late in March 1940, the underground commander Józef Bruckner and an aide opened fire on police at his conspiratorial flat on Sosnowa Street. The pair fought briefly and escaped. In retaliation, German forces arrested 34 men aged 17 to 60 who lived in the same building. All of them were executed at Palmiry on the 23rd of April 1940. On the 2nd of April, about 100 inmates from Pawiak and Mokotów were killed in reprisal for the deaths of two German soldiers in Warsaw. Among them were the theologian Father Jan Krawczyk, the attorney Bogumił Marzec, and the critic and editor Stefan Napierski. Also killed were the labor official Bohdan Offenberg, the army captain Zbigniew Rawicz-Twaróg, the architect Jacek Szwemin, and 27 women. Polish historians estimate that between 700 and 900 people were murdered at Palmiry during this period. A new, more organized phase of killing was about to begin.

• 6. Erasing an Elite

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  In the spring of 1940, NSDAP and SS leaders in the General Government approved a sweeping police operation targeting Poland's political, cultural and social elite. The plan also swept up people merely suspected of anti-Nazi sympathies, framed as a preemptive strike to keep Polish resistance scattered before Germany invaded France. Officials called it AB-Aktion, short for Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion, and it officially ran from May to July 1940, claiming at least 6500 lives across occupied Poland. Arrests began building at the end of March 1940, when Warsaw and nearby cities were hit by a wave of detentions. Pawiak prison filled with intellectuals and prewar politicians over the following weeks. On the 20th of April, the Gestapo arrested 42 Polish attorneys inside the building of Warsaw's Chamber of Attorneys. On the 10th of May, occupation authorities detained more than a dozen school headmasters. The headmasters had defied a German order and closed their schools for Constitution Day on the 3rd of May. As AB-Aktion intensified, so did the pace of killing at Palmiry. The first mass execution of the operation came on the 14th of June 1940. About 20 people were murdered that day, among them the historian Karol Drewnowski and his son Andrzej. The best documented massacre in Palmiry's history followed on the 20th and the 21st of June 1940. Three transports carried 358 prisoners from Pawiak to the glade that day. Among the dead were Maciej Rataj, a former Marshal of the Sejm and acting President of Poland, and Mieczysław Niedziałkowski of the Polish Socialist Party. Also killed were the Olympic athletes Janusz Kusociński, winner of the 10,000 meter race at the 1932 Summer Olympics. Tomasz Stankiewicz, a track cyclist who had competed at the 1924 Summer Olympics, died the same day. The dead that day also included the industrialist Henryk Brun and the activist Agnieszka Dowbor-Muśnicka, daughter of General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki. Several attorneys, painters, writers and the former member of parliament Halina Jaroszewiczowa were killed as well. The killing at Palmiry, however, was far from finished.

• 7. The Killing Continues

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  Governor-General Hans Frank officially declared AB-Aktion over on the 23rd of July 1940, yet massacres at Palmiry continued for another year. On the 30th of August 1940, at least 87 people were executed at the glade. Among them were several people who had been arrested in Włochy three months earlier. Another mass execution followed on the 17th of September 1940, when about 200 Pawiak prisoners, including 20 women, were shot. The dead that day included the attorneys Tadeusz Panek and Zbigniew Wróblewski, and Father Zygmunt Sajna, a parish priest from Góra Kalwaria. Also killed were the journalists Jadwiga Bogdziewicz and Jan Borski. Historian Regina Domańska has linked this killing to the discovery of an underground printing house on Lwowska Street in Warsaw. Circumstances of later 1940 killings grew harder to trace. Postwar exhumation uncovered three unexplained mass graves holding 74, 28 and 24 corpses, apparently buried in the winter of 1939 or 1940. Domańska has documented a further execution of about 27 Pawiak prisoners on the 4th of December 1940. Wardzyńska separately estimates that up to 260 people may have died at Palmiry that winter altogether. On the 7th of March 1941, soldiers from the Union of Armed Struggle assassinated the actor Igo Sym, a known Nazi collaborator and Gestapo agent. Four days later, in retaliation, 21 Pawiak prisoners were shot at Palmiry. Among them were the biologist Stefan Kopeć and the historian Kazimierz Zakrzewski, both professors at the University of Warsaw. On the 1st of April 1941, about 20 men from Łowicz were executed there, among them the town's deputy mayor, Adolf Kutkowski. A further 30 prisoners, including 14 women, were killed on the 12th of June 1941. The group included the poet and radio journalist Witold Hulewicz, the politician and critic Stanisław Piasecki, the lawyer Jerzy Szurig and the attorney Stanisław Malinowski. The last known mass execution at Palmiry took place on the 17th of July 1941. Of the 47 people murdered that day, mostly Pawiak prisoners, victims included the journalist Zygmunt Dymek and six unnamed women. After that date, German authorities stopped using the glade. They most likely realized that the Polish resistance and the wider public already understood what had happened there.

• 8. Justice and Memory

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  The Polish Red Cross, working with the Chief Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, began searching and exhuming the Palmiry site after the war. The work ran from the 25th of November to the 6th of December 1945. A second phase continued from the 28th of March 1946 into that summer. Guided by the markers Adam Herbański and his fellow foresters had risked their lives to leave, investigators located 24 mass graves. Only 576 of the exhumed dead could be identified at the time, though Polish historians later added another 480 names. Some graves in the forest near Palmiry may still remain undiscovered. In 1948, the glade was turned into a war cemetery and mausoleum. It later also received the remains of victims killed at other sites within the so-called Warsaw Death Ring. Around 2204 people are buried there in total. A branch museum, the Palmiry National Memorial Museum, opened at the site in 1973. Father Zygmunt Sajna, murdered at Palmiry on the 17th of September 1940, was one of 108 Polish martyrs of the Second World War. Pope John Paul II beatified them on the 13th of June 1999. Father Kazimierz Pieniążek, another victim, has been named a Servant of God and is one of 122 Polish martyrs whose beatification process began in 1994. Historian Richard C. Lukas has called Palmiry "one of the most notorious places of mass executions" in Poland. In 2011, Polish president Bronisław Komorowski described it as "to some extent the Warsaw Katyn." Justice reached some of the men responsible. Ludwig Fischer, governor of the Warsaw district from 1939 to 1945, was captured by Allied forces after the war. So was Josef Meisinger, the SD and Sicherheitspolizei commander in Warsaw from 1939 to 1941. Both men were handed over to Polish authorities. Their trial ran from the 17th of December 1946 to the 24th of February 1947. On the 3rd of March 1947, the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw sentenced both men to death. Fischer and Meisinger were hanged at Mokotów Prison in March 1947. SS-Gruppenführer Paul Moder, who led the SS and police in the Warsaw district from 1940 to 1941, never stood trial. He died on the Eastern Front in February 1942, killed in combat before any tribunal could try him.