Remains of 8,000 Nazi camp victims found in Poland

Samples from mass grave will be sent for DNA analysis to discover more about victims' identities

A symbolic grave in the Bialucki Forest near Ilowo in Poland, where the mass grave of about 8,000 Nazi victims from the nearby Soldau concentration camp was unearthed. AFP

A mass grave containing the ashes of about 8,000 people has been found near a former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, the country's Institute of National Remembrance said on Wednesday.

The institute, which investigates crimes committed during the Nazi occupation of Poland and the communist era, said the remains were unearthed near the Soldau concentration camp, now known as Dzialdowo, north of Warsaw.

Nazi Germany built the camp when it occupied Poland during the Second World War, using it as a place of transit, internment and extermination for Jews, political opponents and members of the Polish political elite.

Estimates have put the number of prisoners killed at Soldau at 30,000, but the true death toll has never been established.

The grim discovery of about 17.5 tonnes of human ashes meant at least 8,000 people died there, investigator Tomasz Jankowski said.

The victims buried in the mass grave "were probably assassinated around 1939 and mostly belonged to the Polish elites", he said.

In 1944, the Nazi authorities ordered Jewish prisoners to dig up the bodies and burn them to wipe out evidence of war crimes.

Andrzej Ossowski, a genetics researcher at the Pomeranian Medical University, told AFP that samples from the ashes had been taken and would be studied in a laboratory.

"We can carry out DNA analysis, which will allow us to find out more about the identity of the victims," Dr Ossowski said, after similar studies were conducted at former Nazi camps at Sobibor and Treblinka.