July 15:  The Bialuty Forest, about 100 miles north of Warsaw, has long been known to contain buried bodies of World War II slain inmates, but investigators didn’t know exactly where. 

This month, archaeologists from the Institute of National Remembrance were able to locate two mass graves in the forest.

They found the ashes of an estimated 8,000 people, mostly Polish, executed by the Nazis in the forest. 

Seventeen tons of ashes were found in two pits, each about 10 feet deep. 

According to the head of the Institute of National Remembrance, Karol Nawrocki, starting in around March 1944, the remains, which had been buried in the forest after execution, were “brought out, burned and pulverized in order to prevent this crime from ever being known, in order to prevent anyone taking responsibility for it.” 

Inmates of the Soldau Nazi German prisoner camp were executed in the forest between 1940-1944,  near the Polish town of Dzialdowo. The prison camp was occupied mostly by Polish upper class, captured soldiers and resistance fighters, as well as Jews. It was built in 1939 during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II.

In 1944, Jewish prisoners were ordered to exhume the bodies and set them on fire. Investigators believe the Nazis later tried to hide the remains by planting trees on the burial pits.

A symbolic cross has been placed at the site of the mass grave.