Polish Remembrance Institute to Resume Probe Into Nazi Concentration Camp Crimes

WARSAW (Sputnik) — Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) intends to resume an inquiry into the Nazi concentration camp Ravensbruck, where thousands of Polish women were tortured and gassed, in early 2017, IPN’s Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation said Friday.

"The Main Commission … which suspended the probe left a vast trove of documents, including testimonies of over 500 prisoners of the German camp. Their analysis requires a lot of effort … Therefore the formal decision to resume the inquiry will likely be announced in early 2017," IPN Commission chief Andrzej Pozorski said.

IPN, a state body researching Nazi crimes, estimates that 40,000 women – almost a quarter of all prisoners – were Polish. Only 8,000 of them survived routine violence, overwork and torture at the camp, including experiments by camp doctors. Some 20,000 Polish men and a thousand girls were held in the satellite camps.

Ravensbruck came down in history as the Nazi regime’s largest concentration camp for women. It opened months before Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. A total of 130,000 female prisoners passed through the facility over the next six year, 90,000 of them died.