Mass grave of Marienburg

Information board at the Marienburger Grabfeld in Stare Czarnowo

The mass grave of Marienburg was a mass grave in the city of Malbork (German Marienburg ), which was discovered in October 2008 during excavation work for the foundation of a new hotel. It contained the bones of 2,116 people (1001 women, 381 men and 377 children as well as over 300 other people whose sex and age could not be determined more precisely).

The site was located at Ulica Piastowska 18 on the site of the former Polish House near the Marienburg Order Castle .

The investigation by Polish authorities, led by Public Prosecutor Waldemar Zduniak, began after several hundred human skeletons were found. According to the age and sex distribution, the dead were civilians. No clothing or other items were found on them. About a hundred of the skulls were bullet-proof. According to the assumption of Polish archaeologists, the found dead were German civilians from the spring of 1945. 1,840 people from the city of Marienburg alone are missing to this day.

The victims were buried on August 19, 2009 at the German military cemetery Stare Czarnowo (Neumark) in Glinna ( Glien ) near Stettin . The decision for the cemetery in Glinna was made by the German side after the Polish side had proposed a cemetery in Danzig.

While the government representatives of Poland and Germany did not officially comment on the incident and the responsible authorities and non-governmental organizations tried to treat the incident as sensitively as possible, the discovery of the mass grave in the media landscape triggered a sometimes controversial discussion and a series of speculations.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Statement of the Society for Anthropology e. V. (GfA) on the skeleton finds in Malbork (Marienburg). (pdf) Society for Anthropology, accessed on July 1, 2018 . 
2. ^ The corpses identified as Germans ( Memento from August 17, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
3. ^ Marienburger mass grave - war dead buried near Szczecin. n-tv, August 14, 2009, accessed July 1, 2018 . 

Web links

• Are there typhus dead in the mass grave? , ARD, January 16, 2009
• Horrible find: the mass grave of Marienburg. In: Spiegel TV , January 2009 ( online )
• The bodies identified as Germans . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 13, 2009 ( online )
• Sybille Korte: The enigmatic mass grave. In: Berliner Zeitung , January 17, 2009 ( online )
• Georg Bönisch, Jan Puhl, Klaus Wiegrefe : The secret of the bones. In: Spiegel , January 20, 2009 ( online )
• Mechanical head injury. In: Spiegel online , June 1, 2010 ( online )

Coordinates: 54 ° 2 ′ 17 ″  N , 19 ° 1 ′ 54 ″  E