Executions at Palmiry

On 20 and 21 June 1940 three convoys of lorries left Warsaw’s Pawiak prison. The prisoners had been allowed to take luggage and food for the journey, and some were given extra bread – it looked like a transfer to a concentration camp. The lorries, however, drove north-west of the city, to a clearing in the forest near the village of Palmiry (PL), on the edge of the Kampinos Forest. There, over pits dug in advance, the Germans shot 358 people over those two days. Among the dead were the former Marshal of the Sejm Maciej Rataj, one of the leaders of the PPS Mieczysław Niedziałkowski and the Olympic 10,000 metres champion Janusz Kusociński.

It was the largest of all the executions the Germans carried out at Palmiry in 1939–1941 – known collectively as the Palmiry massacre – and the best-known episode of the AB-Aktion, aimed at the Polish elites in the General Government in the spring and summer of 1940. Chronologies usually list the execution under “20–21 June” or as a killing “on the night of 20–21 June”. The sources simply speak of two days and three convoys, not of a single night. According to their biographies, Rataj, Niedziałkowski and Kusociński died on 21 June; for some victims, such as the deputy mayor of Warsaw Jan Pohoski, the date of death is given as “20 or 21 June”.

The “clearing of death”

Before the war there were military ammunition depots near Palmiry, which local people called the “powder house”. In September 1939 they supplied the defenders of the capital, and their loss hit the Warsaw garrison hard. After the city’s capitulation the Germans removed the tracks and the foundations of the stores and cut down the trees around the clearing, which was gradually enlarged. The killing ground lay by the road to the village of Pociecha, about 7 kilometres from the Modlin road and about 30 kilometres from the centre of Warsaw.

The occupiers chose the forest near Palmiry because shootings in the city itself could not be kept secret. In the autumn of 1939 the SS and the police killed prisoners in the gardens behind the Sejm building, but word of it soon spread. According to Władysław Teofil Bartoszewski, in mid-December 1939 Governor-General Hans Frank visited the former military site on the edge of the forest. The first executions at Palmiry took place on 7 and 8 December 1939, when 80 and 70 people were shot there. On 14 December another 46 died. The victims of the first months were Warsaw residents, Jews among them, inhabitants of Legionowo and Zakroczym shot in reprisal for attacks on Germans, and members of the first underground organisations. By various counts, between about 700 and almost 900 people were killed at Palmiry by April 1940.

The executions followed a set pattern. A few days beforehand, a Labour Service unit from the village of Łomna or Hitler Youth boys dug pits 2.5–3 metres deep and up to 30 metres long or more. The condemned were brought at dawn, mostly from Pawiak, less often from Mokotów prison. On arrival their luggage was taken from them, sometimes their hands were tied and their eyes covered, and then they were led in groups to the edge of the pit and shot with machine guns so that the bodies fell in. The wounded were finished off with pistols. The shooting was done by soldiers of the 1st SS Cavalry Regiment (1. SS-Totenkopf-Reiterstandarte), stationed in Warsaw, and by members of the Protection Police (Schutzpolizei). The prisoners were selected and arrested by the Gestapo under the commander of the Security Police and SD in Warsaw, SS-Standartenführer Josef Meisinger. After each execution the graves were camouflaged with moss and pine needles and young pines were planted on them, while families were sent notices of death “from natural causes”, most often heart failure.

The AB-Aktion

Palmiry was not the only place where the Germans murdered the Polish intelligentsia. In the lands annexed to the Reich the Intelligenzaktion had been under way since the autumn of 1939, preceded by the work of the task forces during the September campaign, and in Kraków in November 1939 the professors of the city’s universities were arrested. In the General Government, in the spring of 1940, the occupation authorities concluded that Polish society had recovered from the defeat and that the underground was growing stronger. On 8 March Frank told his officials that Adolf Hitler had instructed him to keep the General Government completely quiet. At the end of March a wave of arrests swept the whole country: political and social activists, officials, teachers, doctors, lawyers and clergy were detained. The commander of the Union of Armed Struggle in the General Government, Colonel Stefan Rowecki, reported to London that the arrests had “reached a scale unknown until now” and were preventive in nature – aimed at the intelligentsia as such.

The German offensive in the West, launched on 10 May, drew the world’s attention away from Poland. On 16 May 1940, at a conference in Kraków, Frank, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger and the commander of the Security Police, SS-Brigadeführer Bruno Streckenbach, decided to carry out an “extraordinary pacification action” (Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion). The same day Frank entrusted it to Streckenbach. On 30 May he explained to police commanders that “while German blood is being shed in the West”, National Socialists had to make sure the Poles did not rise, and that the aim was “the accelerated liquidation of the majority of the rebellious politicians in our hands”. He admitted that “several thousand Poles” would have to “part with their lives”. About 3,000 common criminals were also included in the action. In the organisers’ intention, combining the two groups would present Polish activists as “troublemakers” on a par with bandits. Many of those arrested were deported to concentration camps – on 2 May a transport of about 1,500 prisoners left Pawiak for Sachsenhausen. Those whom the Germans had decided to kill, however, were no longer sent to the Reich, from where, as in the case of the Kraków professors, news of their fate might reach the outside world, but were shot on the spot after a sham procedure before summary police courts.

In the Warsaw district Meisinger was responsible for the action. On 14 June 1940, the day the Germans entered Paris, about 20 members of the underground Polish People’s Independence Action (PL), arrested in January, were shot at Palmiry. It was the first execution there as part of the AB-Aktion. Six days later the largest group of prisoners met the same fate.

Prisoners from Pawiak

Among the 358 victims of the executions of 20 and 21 June were 82 women. The dead came from almost every circle of pre-war Warsaw – politicians of different camps, officials, lawyers, artists, sportsmen and members of the underground.

The best known of them was 56-year-old Maciej Rataj, a leader of the peasant movement and Marshal of the Sejm in 1922–1928. He had twice acted as President of the Republic: in December 1922, after the assassination of Gabriel Narutowicz, and in May 1926, when President Stanisław Wojciechowski stepped down after Piłsudski’s coup. Before the war he led the People’s Party in place of Wincenty Witos, who was in exile. In September 1939 he stayed in Warsaw, was one of the initiators of the Workers’ Brigade for the Defence of Warsaw, and after the capitulation founded an underground peasant party and co-founded the Chief Political Council (PL) attached to the Service for Poland’s Victory. The Gestapo arrested him in November 1939 and released him three months later for lack of evidence. He turned down offers to leave the country, returned to the underground and was arrested again in the spring of 1940.

Together with him, the Council was joined by Mieczysław Niedziałkowski, the 46-year-old theorist and one of the leaders of the Polish Socialist Party, a long-serving member of the Sejm and from 1927 editor-in-chief of “Robotnik” (PL), and one of the founders of the opposition Centrolew. In besieged Warsaw he worked with Rataj to form the workers’ battalions, and at the end of September he was in favour of capitulation. The Gestapo arrested him on 23 December 1939.

The 33-year-old Janusz Kusociński was, together with Stanisława Walasiewicz, the most popular Polish sportsman of the interwar years. At the Los Angeles Olympics (PL) on 31 July 1932 he won the 10,000 metres, beating the Finns. In September 1939 he volunteered for the army and defended the capital as a corporal, and was twice wounded. Under the occupation he was active in the “Wilki” Military Organisation (PL). After it was broken up following a denunciation, the Gestapo arrested him at the end of March 1940 (on 26 or 28 March, depending on the source) in the gateway of the house on Noakowskiego Street where he lived. Interrogated at the Gestapo headquarters on Szucha Avenue, he was tortured. From the same organisation came 20-year-old Agnieszka Dowbor-Muśnicka, also shot at Palmiry, the daughter of General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, whose sister Janina Lewandowska had been killed in the spring of the same year at Katyn.

Also killed were, among others, Jan Pohoski (PL), an architect and deputy mayor of Warsaw alongside Stefan Starzyński; the member of the Sejm and senator Halina Jaroszewiczowa (PL); the industrialist and member of the Sejm Henryk Brun (PL), president of the Association of Polish Merchants; the Warsaw city district head Ludomir Skórewicz (PL); the secretary general of the Union of Poles in the Free City of Danzig, Jan Wajzer; the lawyers Władysław Dziewałtowski-Gintowt and Tadeusz Fabiani; and the cyclist Tomasz Stankiewicz (PL), an Olympic silver medallist at Paris in 1924.

Traces of the crime

The Germans tried to make sure that no one learned about Palmiry. The first executions were photographed for the record; on 3 May 1940 Meisinger forbade this. On execution days Polish forestry workers were sent home, and police patrolled the area. Even so, the inhabitants of Palmiry and Pociecha saw the lorries arriving and heard the shots. The head forester Adam Herbański and other forestry staff would go to the clearing, usually the night after an execution, and at the risk of their lives marked the places of the graves. The local parish priest recorded the dates and numbers of victims in the parish books. As a result the underground soon learned the truth, the name Palmiry appeared in the clandestine press, and the intelligence service of the Union of Armed Struggle obtained more than a dozen photographs taken by the Germans and sent them to London.

Many of the condemned, convinced they were going to a camp, had documents, letters and small belongings on them. Years later this made it possible to identify some of the bodies. With Rataj’s remains were found letters from home, the walking stick he always carried and a wallet with his personal papers. Kusociński’s grave was recognised in 1947 by his sister – by a figurine of St Anthony and a comb she had given him.

What came next

The AB-Aktion did not end the executions at Palmiry. On 23 July 1940 Frank announced its end, and according to Streckenbach’s report, never verified, at least 6,500 people had been murdered across the General Government, among them about 3,500 members of the elites. Prisoners continued to be brought to the “clearing of death”, however: on 30 August 87 people were shot, on 17 September about 200. The last known execution was carried out on 17 July 1941. Historians are not certain that it really was the last.

According to the estimates accepted today, the victims of all the executions at Palmiry numbered more than 1,700. The exhumation figures differ depending on the source. The graves team of the Polish Red Cross, led by Jadwiga Boryta-Nowakowska and helped by the foresters, worked from 25 November 1945 to 10 June 1946. The IPN states that 1,720 bodies were recovered from 24 graves and that about 400 were identified. According to other accounts 576 bodies were identified, and the names of a further 480 victims were established from lists of transports from Pawiak and from witness statements. Bartoszewski stressed that the full number of those killed is not known, because only the places marked by the foresters were searched. Since 2023 the IPN has been carrying out new searches there and, in successive stages, is still finding remains.

In 1948 a cemetery was laid out on the former clearing, where victims of other executions around Warsaw were also buried – depending on the source, 2,115 or 2,204 people rest there. Rataj, Niedziałkowski and Kusociński lie among them. The governor of the Warsaw district, Ludwig Fischer, and Meisinger answered for the crime in court: the Supreme National Tribunal sentenced both to death on 3 March 1947, and the sentences were carried out. The SS and Police Leader of the Warsaw district, Paul Moder, was killed on the Eastern Front in 1942, and Streckenbach survived the war.