Exactly 80 years ago in Auschwitz, the Germans received the first mass transport of Polish political prisoners. The list of names has been reconstructed

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum published a list of 728 people deported to the concentration camp on June 14, 1940 in the first mass transport of political prisoners. It took nearly 75 years to reconstruct the list of names. Not all of them are yet known.

The first records have not survived, because when the Germans realized that they were going to lose the war, they started to destroy the documentation and obliterate the traces of their crimes. This list was reconstructed on the basis of residual documents, various sources, accounts and memories, including materials provided by the families of prisoners

— says Dr. Roman Gieroń, a historian from the Historical Research Bureau of the Institute of National Remembrance, to the portal wPolityce.pl.

Out of this group 325 people survived the war, 292 people died and the fate of 111 people remains unknown.

Since they were political prisoners from the first months of German occupation, they often belonged to an elite group of Poles engaged in resistance against the Third Reich.

The list of people from the first mass transport of prisoners to the Auschwitz concentration camp, published by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, was prepared by Szymon Kowalski, deputy head of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Archives:

Tłum. K.J.