Exhumation research concerning the victims of political repressions in 1945-1956 in Poland: A new direction in forensic medicine

In 2011 in Wroclaw (Poland), the bodies of 223 prisoners were exhumed, including the victims of political repressions and prosecutions in the period 1949-1954, during which people fighting for the independence of Poland were executed and buried in unidentified graves in various graveyards. It was the first exhumation conducted in Poland on such a large scale. The aim of the present publication is to describe the new direction in forensic medicine employed in these exhumations, which resulted from the new opportunities created by the opening of the state archives after the political transformation of 1989. The authors describe the difficulties they encountered during their exploration of prisoners' burial grounds. The graveyards included in the investigation bear the marks of an intentional policy of confusion and secret burial methods. First, significant disorder in the logical (based on time of death) sequence of burials was observed. This made identification difficult. A substantial time lapse between death and burial in each case, along with the unavailability of comparative data, limited the use of identification methods widely employed in forensic medicine. For this reason, initial analysis had to be based on observations and confirmations made by forensic medicine about the sequence of burials as compared to cemetery documentation. Situations such as this clearly call for the cooperation of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and forensic pathologists. Political transformations in Eastern Europe in the 1990s gave rise to hopes of exchanging experiences in this type of research as conducted in other countries of the former Eastern Bloc.