The artefacts were officially handed over on Friday to the Gross-Rosen Museum, based in what is today the southwestern Polish village of Rogoźno, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
IPN CEO Karol Nawrocki said at the ceremony that the Nazi German death camp “was not only a place of extermination, but also of profound exploitation.”
Mass burial site
The items donated to the Gross-Rosen Museum were found by IPN investigators between 2017 and 2018 in a mass grave on the grounds of the former death camp, reporters were told.
The mass burial site, located in an anti-aircraft ditch, contained the remains of 92 male inmates aged 20 to 60, as well as over 700 artefacts, including personal belongings of prisoners and guards, according to officials.
The artefacts recovered from the mass grave included aluminium mess kits, dishes and spoons used by the prisoners, some with their initials; and various items belonging to the guards, such as tableware made of porcelain, ceramics and enamel, metal-alloy ashtrays, some with adornments and initials, as well as razors, door keys and cigarette lighters, officials said.
The IPN’s Nawrocki paid tribute to the people whose bodies were found in the mass grave.
He told reporters: "All these 92 men had lives ... and they all lay covered with earth for nearly 80 years as if they were trash."
He added that his Institute of National Remembrance was working "so that no victim of a totalitarian regime is forgotten or left abandoned in a nameless grave."
‘Germany should finally bear responsibility for World War II’
Nawrocki told reporters that Gross-Rosen inmates were used for slave labour by some of Germany’s leading firms that are still in operation on markets worldwide.
He said: “Companies such as Zeiss, Blaupunkt and Siemens operated here, building their economic potential on blood, suffering, death and tears.”
Nawrocki added: “It's further proof that Germany should finally bear responsibility for World War II. It should pay.”
Gross-Rosen death camp
Founded in 1940, the Gross-Rosen Nazi German concentration and death camp operated until 1945. The inmates were forced to work at a local granite quarry. According to the latest estimates, some 40,000 people died at the camp, the PAP news agency reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, tvp.info, ipn.gov.pl, gross-rosen.eu