News

After years of searching, the burial place of 119 Polish prisoners of war of Stalag XI A Altengrabow – soldiers of the September Campaign of 1939 and Warsaw Insurgents have been found successfully at last. Our Museum was engaged in the works.

After the end World War 2, the grounds of the former Stalag XI A became a shooting range of the Soviet Army. When, in 1994, it was closed, there was no trace of the cemetery left, and its location for years remained a mystery. The attempts made in 2006 to find it failed. Still, the issue was not forgotten – field research had preceded painstaking research in Polish and foreign archives, which Dr Piotr Stanek, Head of the Research Department of CMJW, was taking part in. The analysis of the collected materials allowed recreating the history of the cemetery and establishing the data relating to the Polish POWs buried in it.

The archival plans and sketches of the camp proved invaluable; so did aerial photographs of 1945 thanks to which it was possible to mark the hypothetical burial place. The works carried out between 3–5 August 2026 by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and a team of the Pomeranian Medical University in Szczecin, in cooperation with the German party, confirmed the location of the cemetery. The next stage will consist in exhumation of the bodies and providing the fallen soldiers with a dignified resting place.We will keep you informed about further actions taken in this respect.