The Polish city of Malbork has found a mass grave with the remains of some 1,800 people, thought to be former German residents of the town. They apparently died as the Red Army marched through Poland -- and some of them appear to have been executed.

The first skeletons were unearthed by construction workers last October. A pit dug for the foundation of a new hotel in the Polish city of Malbork revealed the remains of dozens of corpses, all heaped together in what was apparently a World War II-era mass grave. But plenty of questions remained, and investigators began taking a closer look.

The remains were found not far from the famous Malbork Castle.
This week, Piotr Szwedowski, a Malbork city official, revealed what they found. "Since then, we have exhumed around 1,800 corpses," he told the news agency AFP. "We are pretty sure that they were former residents of Malbork."

City officials are also pretty sure that they were victims of a massacre. Szwedowski said that one in 10 of the corpses had been shot in the head. All of them, furthermore, had been buried naked, "without shoes, without clothes, without personal items," he said. "The metal detectors used during the excavations found no metal, not even a false tooth."...

(Der Spiegel)