JURIST - Paper Chase: Poland authorities investing WWII-era crimes

[JURIST] The Polish Institute of National Remembrance (INR) [official website], the body charged with investigating Nazi and communist-era crimes, on Tuesday began its investigation [JTA report] into crimes committed against Jewish women in a small northeastern Polish town during World War II. It was alleged that in 1941, Jewish women from the ghetto in Szczuczyn were hired by farmers who killed them and buried them in the field. The prosecutor Radoslaw Ignatiew believes that around 11 women from the ghetto were killed and that such incidents were not isolated but had also occurred in other places. The prosecution has currently identified only one of the victims and is seeking to reveal the identities of the remaining victims. Ignatiew also thinks that among the perpetrators were three individuals responsible for a murder in the village of Bzury.

In October of last year INR had opened [JURIST report] another probe into Nazi crimes aimed at tracking down living Nazi perpetrators. As part of the investigation, it was planned to interview approximately 500 camp survivors. During the same month Germany also reopened hundreds of investigations involving former Nazi death camp guards resulting from a May conviction [JURIST reports] of John Demjanjuk [NNDB profile; JURIST news archive], a retired US autoworker who had served as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in 1943. He was deported to Germany in 2009 to stand trial on allegations that he helped to murder thousands during the Holocaust.