WARSAW, Poland—Special investigators in Poland say they have found two mass graves containing the ashes of at least 8,000 Poles slain by the Nazis during World War II in forest executions that the Nazis later tried to hide by incinerating the bodies and planting trees on the burial pits.
Investigators from a national historical institute marked the finding this week with speeches and wreath-laying at the site in the Bialuty Forest, 160 kilometers ( 100 miles) north of Warsaw.
Starting in March 1944, the bodies that the occupying Nazis had secretly buried in the forest were “brought out, burned and pulverized in order to prevent this crime from ever being known, in order to prevent anyone taking responsibility for it,” Karol Nawrocki, the head of the Institute of National Remembrance, said Wednesday….