dpa
Warsaw
More than 700 victims of Nazi terror during World War II were buried with a state funeral in Poland, according to the news agency PAP on Monday.
Descendants of the victims and Polish government and the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) representatives attended the funeral service in Chojnice in northern Poland, as the remains were displayed in 188 small coffins.
Those who died were Polish civilians murdered by German occupiers in mass executions in what was known as the “Valley of Death” in the autumn of 1939 and January 1945.
Investigations by the IPN led to the discovery of four mass graves near Chojnice and the bodies were exhumed there between 2021 and 2024.
According to IPN historians, SS units murdered around 200 civilians, including teachers, priests, police officers and officials, near Chojnice shortly after the German invasion of Poland. A further 500 people were executed in January 1945, before the Germans withdrew from Poland, under pressure as the Red Army advanced. Some 120 victims of the 1945 executions were identified based on personal items.
Poland on Sunday marked 85 years since the outbreak of World War II during annual commemoration ceremony held at dawn to remember Nazi Germany’s first attacks that triggered the deadly conflict.
Nearly six million Poles died in the conflict that killed more than 50 million people overall, including the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, half of them Polish.
The remembrance ceremony on Sunday was traditionally held in Westerplatte, on Poland’s Baltic coast, where a Nazi German battleship had opened fire on a Polish fort 85 years ago to the day.
Speaking at Westerplatte, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the lessons of World War II were “not an abstraction” and drew parallels with the war in neighbouring Ukraine.
“This war is coming again from the east,” he said. He urged NATO member states to be “fully devoted to defence... against the aggression that we are witnessing today on the battlefields of Ukraine”.
