Poland holds state burial for over 700 victims of Nazi atrocities

Poland on Monday buried the remains of hundreds of people executed en masse by Nazi Germany during World War II, whose remains were discovered in an area known as Death Valley.

The remains were uncovered by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which is charged with investigating Nazi and communist-era crimes and had been probing the area since 2021.

A few hundred people, including the IPN chief and a presidential aide, attended the funeral mass at a basilica in the northern town of Chojnice, which is home to Death Valley.

The wooden coffins adorned with ribbons in the red and white of the Polish flag were then taken to a local cemetery for victims of Nazi crimes.

Six million Poles, half of them Jewish, were killed during Nazi Germany's 1939-45 occupation of Poland during World War II.

"We discovered five mass graves from which we extracted the remains of more than 700 people," IPN official Andrzej Pozorski told AFP.

"We want to do everything we can to identify the people for whom this is technically possible," he added.

The IPN said in a statement that Nazi Germany had "carried out mass murders of Polish citizens -- representatives of the local intelligentsia, including teachers, clergymen, landowners".

It added that 218 asylum patients were also killed.

Archaeologist Dawid Kobialka said they had uncovered skeletons belonging to people killed in 1939, as well as the charred remains of victims from 1945.

"The charred remains measure between one and five centimeters. We exhumed almost a tonne of them during 2021," he said.

"We found almost 7,000 objects: cartridges, bullets but also personal items of the victims which they were wearing at the time of their death."