Jedwabne, a small town near Łomża in northeastern Poland, had been under Soviet occupation from September 1939 until June 1941.
A day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, a Wehrmacht unit passed through the town, greeted with flowers by residents, before continuing eastward.
German gendarmes, numbering roughly eight to 11, then took charge of overseeing the town, alongside a Polish civilian administration headed by a Polish mayor, who Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) investigators say helped organize the killing that followed.
The Jedwabne massacre was one of many such episodes in the region that summer.
Historian Andrzej Żbikowski found that 26 anti-Jewish incidents involving Polish residents took place in the Łomża area and the Białystok region in late June and early July 1941, with the deadliest occurring in nearby Radziłów, where he says local Poles killed 800 Jews on July 7.
Historian Krzysztof Persak of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) wrote that prewar antisemitism underlay the violence, but that ethnic tensions and anti-Jewish resentment built up under Soviet occupation were a stronger immediate motivator, often stoked by German security police operating behind the front line.
Jews, he wrote, became scapegoats blamed for Soviet-era repression under the "Judeo-Bolshevism" stereotype.
Postwar trial, then decades of silence
A Polish court in Łomża tried the case shortly after the war, sentencing one defendant to death and nine others to prison terms of eight to 15 years, though roughly 70 names surfaced during the investigation.
Some witnesses who had implicated others later retracted their testimony, saying it had been extracted through beatings and torture.
The death sentence was ultimately commuted, and all those convicted were released before their terms expired.
The IPN reopened the case in 2000 but closed it in 2003 without identifying additional living suspects, after weighing three possible scenarios: that Germans alone committed the killings, possibly coercing some Poles; that Poles acted entirely on their own initiative; or that Poles carried out the massacre at German instigation, believing they had German permission and would face no consequences.
Disputed exhumation
As part of the investigation, prosecutor Radosław Ignatiew ordered an exhumation of the site in mid-May 2001.
The decision immediately drew opposition from Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who argued it conflicted with Jewish religious law.
"This is a very difficult decision. One has to choose between respect for the dead and the need for truth. For us, the former prevails," Schudrich said in an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza on May 21, 2001, arguing exhumation was unnecessary given the availability of witnesses and other evidence.
On June 4, 2001, then-Justice Minister Lech Kaczyński halted the exhumation work following the Jewish community's intervention, citing the same religious concerns.
The decision drew criticism from historian Jan Tomasz Gross, author of the book Neighbors, who argued at the time that fully clarifying the details of the Jedwabne killings was an urgent obligation, and that Jewish religious law permits various exceptions to the rule against disturbing the remains of the dead.
Gross reiterated that view in a 2016 interview with Kultura Liberalna, though he said he believed any exhumation should not be carried out by the IPN.
Prosecutor's account of the massacre
In a 2002 report, prosecutor Ignatiew, then head of the IPN's regional commission in Bialystok, laid out the likely sequence of events.
He wrote that residents of nearby villages began arriving in Jedwabne on the morning of July 10, 1941, intending to take part in a killing planned in advance, and that some Jewish residents had been warned the night before by their Polish acquaintances.
Jewish residents were driven from their homes starting that morning and gathered in the town square, where they were forced to pull grass from between the paving stones and subjected to violence and abuse by Polish residents of the town and surrounding area.
Ignatiew wrote that numerous witnesses recalled uniformed Germans present in Jedwabne, who likely assisted, in small numbers, in herding victims to the square, but that it remains unclear from conflicting testimony whether they helped escort victims to the barn or were present there.
A group of 40 to 50 Jewish men, including the town's rabbi, was forced to first destroy a statue of Lenin erected during the Soviet occupation and carry its fragments to the square and then into a barn; they were killed there by unknown means, and their bodies, along with the smashed statue's pieces, were thrown into a pit dug inside the barn.
A second, larger group—likely around 300 people, based on estimates by the archaeological team involved in later exhumations, including men, women and children of all ages—was led from the square roughly one to one-and-a-half hours later, according to one witness, or in the late afternoon, according to others.
They were forced into a wooden, thatch-roofed barn, which was then doused with kerosene and set ablaze, burning the victims alive.
Disputed death toll
Ignatiew's report addressed the figure of about 1,600 victims cited in Gross' book, concluding that incomplete exhumation work made it impossible to establish a definitive death toll, and that a figure of 1,600 or close to it appeared highly improbable and was not corroborated by the investigation.
He noted that some Jewish residents, including refugees from nearby Wizna and Kolno, were in Jedwabne that day, but that several dozen Jews are known to have survived and continued living in the town and surrounding area until late 1942.
Ignatiew concluded that Polish civilians played the decisive role in carrying out the killing, though the presence of German gendarmes and other uniformed Germans—even if largely passive—amounted to permission and tolerance of the crime, making Germans culpable in a broad legal sense as instigators.
The direct perpetrators, he wrote, were Polish residents of Jedwabne and the surrounding area, at least about 40 men, who actively took part in the killings armed with clubs, wagon shafts and other tools.
Witness testimony indicated the victims' property was looted afterward.
The prosecutor said it was impossible to determine why most townspeople remained passive during the massacre—whether out of tacit approval or fear of the perpetrators' violence—and that such passivity could not be assessed in criminal-legal terms or form the basis of criminal responsibility.
He noted that of those named as perpetrators in case files, some had already been legally tried, while others had died by the time of his investigation, and that insufficient evidence existed to identify or charge any other living participants in the killings.
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Source: PAP
Click on the audio player above to listen to a report by Piotr Urbaniak.