President Bronislaw Komorowski has opened a new Museum of Struggle and Martyrdom today in Palmiry, south of Warsaw, where the German Nazi occupying forces carried out mass executions of Poles during World War II.The wave of executions focused on the Polish elite, during the so-called AB Action, taking in social activists, politicians, priests, professors and cultural luminaries, including both Catholics and Jews.
Over 2000 victims were exhumed at Palmiry following the war and a cemetery was created. Evidence had been collated by the Polish underground.
The Germans exterminated thousands of other members of the intelligentsia at other locations across Poland.
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Auschwitz internee, and a member of Poland's wartime Council to Aid Jews, noted that the plan for the extermination of the Polish elite was drawn up in 1940 by Nazi Governor Hans Frank.
Bartoszewski, who remains politically active in the office of the ruling Civic Platform party, and who served as foreign minister twice since the fall of communism, noted that the victims in Palmiry represented an impediment to Nazi plans.
“[The victims] provide a testament, that the occupants regarded them as a threat to their plans to subordinate Poland.”
Recent research by the state-sponsored Institute of National Remembrance holds that only 10 percent of Polish citizens who had finished university education before 1939 remained on Polish territory in the war's aftermath.
The gaping hole considers citizens who emigrated (Catholic and Jewish), and those who perished as a result of Nazi and Soviet crimes.
(nh)Source: IAR