According to eyewitnesses still alive today, German Gestapo men committed a wartime atrocity in Jedwabne, Poland, on July 10, 1941, in which they forced some 300 Jews to march in a mock-funeral procession while carrying the head of Lenin removed from a concrete monument.

The Gestapo men divided the marchers into two groups. The first group consisted of some 50 stronger Jews, men strong enough to defend themselves. The second group was formed from the approximately 250 remaining Jews, mostly old people, women, and children.
While the second group was held back, the first group was directed into a 62.4 by 23 foot wooden barn. The 50 Jewish men were ordered to dig a large grave inside the barn, ostensibly for Lenin'sconcrete head. As the diggers were near the grave, the Germans shot them and then ordered several Poles to cover with dirt the bodies of the slain Jewish men and Lenin's concrete head in the grave #1. 

After this was accomplished, the Germans ordered the second, more defenseless, group into the barn, which moments later would be turned into a gigantic funeral pyre.

Stefan Boczkowski and Roman Chojnowski reported seeing the following scene: A small German military truck loaded with soldiers and canisters full of gasoline quickly pulled up to the barn crowded with Jews. Some of the soldiers jumped down from the truck, and those
soldiers staying in the truck handed them the canisters of gasoline, which they poured on all outside walls of the barn. The flames engulfed the entire barn at once. Pyrotechnic analysis indicates that the Germans used some 100 gallons (over 400 liters) of gasoline to burn and
suffocate the victims (by inhalation of the hot smoke). Later the Germans ordered some Poles at gun point to bury the decomposing bodies of the 250 victims in the grave #2 located just outside of the barn.

Thus, the German Gestapo with the help of some ethnic Germans and a few local criminals collected the Jews of Jedwabne on the town square and drove them by physical violence to the place of their murder. The Germans shot some 50 Jew and burned alive 250 others. 

In the investigation by the Polish government bodies of the victims of the massacre of July 10, 1941 were found buried in the graves #1 and #2.

Thorough search in the vicinity found no other graves of the massacre of
the Jews in Jedwabne.

"The evidence collected by the West Germans, including the positive identification of [Hauptsturmfuehrer] Herman Schaper by witnesses from Łomża, Tykocin, and RadziłÃ³w, suggested that it was indeed Schaper's men who carried out the killings in those locations.
Investigators also suspected based on the similarity of the methods used to destroy the Jewish communities of RadziłÃ³w, Tykocin, Rutki, Zambrów, Jedwabne, Pitnica, and Wizna between July and September 1941 that Schaper's men were the perpetrators. The method used to kill the Jews of Jedwabne was exactly the same that had been employed by the Gestapo to kill the Jews of RadziłÃ³w only three days earlier." Alexander B. Rossino, historian at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Article printed in Polin, Volume 16.

Information compiled in Dec. 2001, by Iwo C. Pogonowski on the basis of court documents brought from Poland by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Kościuszko Chair Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia

Note: Dr. Chodakiewicz is preparing for publication his book:
THE MASSACRE AT JEDWABNE, JULY 10, 1941, BEFORE, DURING, AFTER

Prof. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, , 0000-00-00

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