Polish prosecutors have announced that they will not proceed with a criminal investigation into the remains of four people – one of them a child – found beneath a residence used by Herman Goering in Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair” bunker complex.
They say that, while the remains can be dated to the period around the Second World War, it has been impossible to determine the cause of death.
The discovery was made earlier this year by amateur archaeologists at the Wolf’s Lair, which served as Hitler’s eastern front military headquarters during the Second World War. It was where the famous failed assassination plot against Hitler led by Claus von Stauffenberg took place in 1944.
The area the complex is located in was part of German East Prussia before the war but, following postwar border changes, is now in northeast Poland. It is a historical attraction that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.
On 24 February, the Latebra Foundation, a group of history enthusiasts permitted to carry out archaeological work at the site, discovered the human remains beneath a house that had been used by Goering, one of the most powerful figures in Nazi Germany.
The site of the discovery (image credit: Nadleśnictwo Srokowo)
This week, the district prosecutor’s office in the nearby city of Olsztyn announced that their investigation had found the remains most likely came from four people, three of them middle-aged men and the other a child of undetermined gender.
Their time of death was determined as having been “several decades ago”, spokesman Daniel Brodowski told the Polish Press Agency (PAP). However, the incomplete nature of the remains did not allow a cause of death to be determined.
“There were no injuries that could indicate a criminal cause of death,” said Brodowski. As such, prosecutors have decided to close the case. The remains will now be transferred to the local authorities for burial.
Limbless skeletons found in Hitler's Wolf's Lair.
This discovery is unprecedented for this location. Its occurrence was entirely unexpected, as we had never imagined such events could transpire, especially given the stringent security of the Third Reich. Even after the war, when… pic.twitter.com/D7dbDogzxd
— 4tv News Channel (@4tvhyd) May 3, 2024
Last week, Zenon Piotrowicz, the head of the Srokowo Forest District in which the Wolf’s Lair is located, had already revealed that prosecutors were discontinuing the case.
But he said that the forest authority and the Latebra Foundation wanted to publicise the story in the hope that someone would come forward with information that could “help us solve the mystery of where these remains come from”.
Speaking to the Gazeta Wyborcza daily, Piotrowicz said he believed the bodies were buried shortly after the war. He suggested they could have been victims of Soviet troops who were stationed there after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Another possibility is that they were accidental victims of landmines that remained in the area for a decade after the war, said Piotrowicz. A more far-fetched theory is that they were victims of some kind of occult practice during the Nazi period.
A map of the Wolf’s Lair complex, showing Goering’s house as number 33 (source: Before My Ken/Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY-SA 3.0)
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Main image credit: Avi1111/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
