Almost 300 documents produced by the German forces occupying the Polish city of Łódź during the Second World War have been recovered by the police after an attempt to illegally sell them online.
The files are of significant historical value, according to the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a state body responsible for documenting Poland’s twentieth century history. The IPN was involved in the action to recover the material, which a man in Warsaw had tried to sell.
“They include information on the German activities targeting Polish citizens in occupied Łódź, as well as on losses and damages suffered by the Polish nation during the Second World War,” said Robert Janicki, a prosecutor at the IPN’s Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, quoted by Polskie Radio.
Among the documents are files with technical and construction plans, handwritten notes, and material concerning the Nazi Party and it youth organization, the Hitlerjugend.
The materials came to light after their owner sought to sell them online for almost 60,000 zloty (€13,000). However, under Polish law, such documents should be handed over to the IPN. Failing to do so can result in a prison sentence of between 6 months and 8 years.
The man who tried to sell them claims that he purchased them at an open-air market. He has been detained and questioned by police, with the investigation being run by the IPN, which has prosecutorial powers.
The IPN was established in 1999 to document, research, educate on but also prosecute crimes committed against the Polish nation, focusing on the periods of German Nazi, Soviet and communist occupation and rule.
Earlier this year, the government lifted the statute of limitation on communist crimes being investigated by the IPN.
After Poland regained its independence following the First World War, Łódź – which had previously been under Russian control – became part of the new Polish state and one of its most important industrial centres.
In 1939, it fell under German control within a week of the invasion of Poland in September that marked the start of the Second World War. It was then annexed to the German Reich under the name Litzmannstadt.
The Nazis established a Jewish ghetto in the city that was the second largest in German-occupied Europe, after the Warsaw ghetto. Before the war, around one third of Łódź’s population of 670,000 had been Jews; after the Holocaust, almost none survived.
The ethnic Polish population of the city was also treated brutally. In the early stages of the occupation, the Germans murdered around 1,500 intellectuals and clergy in the city as part of the Intelligenzaktion operation aimed at wiping out the Polish elites and Germanising the occupied territories.
Image credit: Warsaw Police Department
Agnieszka Wądołowska is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She has previously worked for Gazeta.pl and Tokfm.pl and contributed to Gazeta Wyborcza, Wysokie Obcasy, Duży Format, Midrasz and Kultura Liberalna
