German authorities began excavating on Wednesday the site believed to contain the remains of more than 750 Jewish concentration camp inmates who were murdered by the Nazis in the final days of the Second World War.
The search began on the 64th anniversary of the liberation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, located about 75 miles (120 km) southeast of Berlin. The site is believed to be the largest mass grave outside the walls of a former concentration camp.
The previous owners of the 5,000 square meter lot, near the Brandenburg town of Jamlitz, prevented the excavation over the last decade.
Investigators are almost certain that the mass grave exists, located on the grounds of the former Lieberose forced-labor camp, a sub-camp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Shot for Refusing to March
The excavation site is where SS officers shot 753 men and women from Poland and Ukraine on February 2, 1945 because they were too sick or exhausted to march away from the camp as the Soviet Red Army was approaching.
On the following day, the SS rounded up and shot to death 589 additional prisoners, mostly by pistol shots at the back of their heads. The remains of the second batch of prisoners were discovered in 1958 and 1971, in a gravel pit about five miles (eight km) away from Lieberose.
During the Communist East German rule, the authorities moved 577 skeletons from the gravel pit, contrary to Jewish law, and erected a memorial. However, the search for other bodies did not pick up speed until the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.
The Communist regime did not permit the investigation of a site in Jamlitz since a Soviet camp in which thousands lost their lives after the Second World War had operated there. Housing units were subsequently learned there.
Between the mid-1990s and 2004, around 20 possible sites were inspected before investigators honed on the site where investigators began their excavation Wednesday. Objections by the landowner were only overcome a year ago.
“There is no doubt that this is the historically authentic place of one of the worst massacres around Berlin,” Peter Fischer, a representative of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, told Reuters Television.
Over the next three weeks, a group of archaeologists, pathologists, and public prosecutors will examine the mass grave. After the dig will be completed, the site will be turned into a Holocaust memorial.
“The construction of a swimming pool or an underground parking garage won’t happen here,” Fischer said. “No, there will be a memorial site, a modest one, maybe one that will be created by future generations,” he added.