Epress.am News from Armenia
Polish authorities have reopened an investigation into World War II crimes committed at Auschwitz and its satellite camps that was closed in the 1980s because of the country’s isolation behind the Iron Curtain.
One aim of the new probe is to track down any living Nazi perpetrators, according to an announcement Thursday by the Institute of National Remembrance, a state body that investigates Nazi and communist-era crimes.
Nazi Germany opened Auschwitz in 1940, months after it invaded and occupied Poland. Over the next five years of war, German and Austrian Nazis murdered up to 1.5 million people there at the expanded Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex, most of them Jews from across Europe, but also Poles, Roma, gays and others.
The investigation was opened by a branch of the remembrance institute in Krakow, which is located near Auschwitz. Germany also operated other death camps across Poland — like Chelmno, Treblinka and Belzec — and it was not immediately clear if new investigations into them are also planned, The Washington Post reports, citing AP.
Poland originally launched investigations into crimes at Auschwitz in the 1960s and 1970s, but closed them in the 1980s without any indictments being made. Poland had difficulty questioning witnesses and perpetrators living abroad because it was cut off behind the Iron Curtain.
The Institute for National Remembrance said it has already begun questioning witnesses as part of the revived investigation. It said the probe is aimed in part at “finding and, if needed, detaining the perpetrators.”
The last time Poland prosecuted anyone for Nazi crimes was in 2001, when a Pole, Henryk Mania, was sentenced to eight years in prison for taking parts in acts of genocide at the death camp of Chelmno.