Evidence Found: Jewish Holocaust Victims at a Nazi Death Camp
Marta Diepenbroek (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Germany), Andrzej Ossowski (Pomeranian Medical University, Poland) and Walther Parson (Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria) discuss their collaborative work which concerns the first genetic and phylogeographic evidence for Jewish Holocaust victims found at the former Nazi death camp in Sobibór, Poland. The team will discuss how history, archeology, anthropology, and forensic analysis of haploid markers came together to make the identifications and shed light on this historical event.
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Hi, everyone.
Welcome at HITS.
It's great to be part of this session.
My name is Marta DiPenbroke.
I work as a postdoctoral researcher
in forensic genomics at LMMU.
Growing up in Poland, the Holocaust
and the knowledge about Holocaust,
it was all very present.
And I was actually very surprised to learn
how many people have no understanding of the Holocaust.
I was reading an article from the Guardian
where they published the results of a survey done
among young Americans.
And it was extremely shocking for me.
Almost 25% of them are not aware that 6 million Jews were
killed in the Holocaust.
And one on 10 things that these were the Jews who
caused the Holocaust.
So when I became a part of the Sobibur project,
I dive into the history behind the discovery.
And even though I'm not an emotional person, in this project,
it really got me very emotional to learn
the whole background about it.
My name is Marta Parsson.
I'm affiliated with the Medical University of NS
Prokian Austria.
And I'm a medical biologist by training.
And this is how I got involved in this project
where we used DNA and DNA typing in order
to identify individuals.
It's very important for those who lost loved ones
to repatriate those remains in order
to give them back the fate of the loved ones.
Hi, I'm Andriosovsky.
I'm the head of the forensic genetics laboratory
in Pomeranian Medical University in Streshing.
I was responsible for the medical analysis
and genetic analysis in this project.
The Sobibur Dev Camp was one of the biggest
places in Poland. It was German, Nazi, Dev Camp.
And we suspect that they killed their syruk about 100,000 people.
In 2000 and 2001, the archaeologists from Poland,
they start to work in Sobibur.
This project, it was part of the Polish genetic database
of the victims of totalitarianism regimes.
And we started in 2012.
Up to now, we identified 120 persons, mostly by DNA,
99% by DNA.
The archaeologists, they found three graves
with the eight victims in the Sobibur.
And in 2013, my team picked up two other skeletons
which were found in the third grave.
Most victims, German, Nazi, they burned with the skeletons.
It was not typical because most graves,
which we found, they were with the ashes.
It was a surprise for them. It was a surprise for us.
We found the evidences.
Pieces of bullets.
Something was wrong with the story.
For archaeologists, it was sure that the burial is not burial
in the period of the Sobibur Dev Camp.
And for us, it was not sure.
When archaeologists found the skeleton remains,
they start cooperating with prosecutors
of Polish Institute of National Remembrance.
It started our work because it was the question
from which period of time there are these remains
and there are these burials.
We started our typical forensic medicine work.
First, forensic anthropology, then forensic medicine.
And we started with DNA.
It's taken many time to find the proof that the victims,
they are the victims of the German Nazi terror.
And the remains, they are not coming victims.
Hey guys, how was the situation like in Sobibur
before you found the remains?
I think that this is very important for people to realize
that Sobibur was not a camp like our epic,
an outfit where people can visit the place
and still see the buildings and have the glimpse
on how the camp looked like because Sobibur is just a forest,
there is nothing there left.
No, nothing there because he was destroyed by the Germans.
There is a city that is called Sobibur, right?
Which is close to the small village.
Yes, there is a very small village.
I understand it's a train station, right,
when they got off the victims directly into the camp.
Exactly, this death camp, it wasn't like Auschwitz.
There was not too much buildings.
People did not work there really.
There was not a group of people who worked there.
The majority of victims directly went into the chambers, right?
Yeah, they had this road to heaven.
They must have had people to help them, right?
Was it only the German guards doing this or were they?
No, of course not.
They were praying and then Nazi German guards were...
Yeah, they had guards from the prisoners of war, the camps.
Yeah, exactly.
And also a small group of people
helped the Nazis to operate the camp.
This was a group of like maximum 60 people at the time.
And they were of course exchanging,
but there was no place for people to work really.
All of the people, as Andy said,
they were sent directly to the gas chambers.
How did they deal with all the bodies?
I mean, if you guess this number of people,
you must end up with an enormous amount of bodies, right?
It was really a death factory.
They used the diesel engine to in gas chamber.
It was some kind of barang.
When they transport the victims,
they put them into this gas chamber.
Because the people didn't know that this is a gas chamber.
Of course.
They go to take a shower or to the doctor.
To the last moment, they didn't know what will happen.
Yeah.
And then they started this diesel engine.
And then they transport the bodies.
So it was right behind the chambers.
Not so far.
And it was not like typical crematory.
At the beginning, they didn't even burn the bodies.
They just buried them in the ground.
And then someone who visited, they come from the Nazi,
they just noticed the smell, the decay.
And then the decision was made to take out again
those decaying bodies and to burn them.
They had the decision was general to get rid of all of the evidence
of the death factory.
So when they started the excavations,
did they ever come across full skeletons
over the always finding ashes?
No, they found only the ashes.
All the wax, like, you saw that these were the layers
of decaying bodies.
But the skeletons were never intact.
And that was already when a rabbi was present.
When they start work, they start with a rabbi.
Some people were a special place.
It's always the Jewish archaeologists with them.
I think it's important to mention that the Jewish burial
should not be disturbed.
OK.
So this is not accepted for a Jewish burial.
It's excavated.
One thing that was puzzling me is there was this group of people
who were able to escape.
And these people, they were giving their experience
about Soviet people, right?
They could at least draw some of the borders.
And they could give information how the camp was looked like.
So this was the information that the archaeologists had
to start their work.
They sketched the possible outskirts of the camp,
how it looked like.
But those testimonies from the survivors,
they only included the part of the camp
because they never visited really the gas chambers.
This is really important to mention
that the people who work there, they could not be informed
about this revolt going.
So none of them escaped.
They just couldn't.
Our knowledge is from the guards.
Archaeology of that place is very important.
We should show how it was.
Because the system, destroying the places like this.
They turned this to the ground.
There was no evidence of the buildings that remained.
They couldn't be connected to criminal activity anymore.
We could only say that this is a kind of economical building,
something that existed in the place before.
But no evidence of criminal activity whatsoever.
Smaller places in which we work, they destroyed very well.
For example, in Aria of John Dovall.
We cooperate with a prosecutor from the Polish IPN.
We open a huge grave 50 meters for four meters.
We suspect that there were three or four thousand victims.
We found only ashes.
It's important to document places like this.
Because after 100 years, nobody believed that there were something.
And also that the memories are failing so fast.
Even if you have an eyewitness only a few years later,
they want to testify the best they can.
But the memories are just really destroyed by the trauma that they went through
So the archaeology is the first step into the real science behind the holocaust
I saw photos right after the war.
And nobody could recognize that there was a death camp.
It was like a foreign forest.
Yes.
But the people living in Sobibor.
I mean, they were living so close.
They didn't hear anything.
Of course, they suspect that something happened there.
Of course, some of them they know.
But not the eyewitness.
No, this was protected.
I think that it was protected.
It was protected from many Nazi even.
Many Nazi didn't know about the existence of this place.
That they used special commandos made by the victims.
In fact, the commando was responsible for this old procedure.
They were all Jewish.
So Jewish people burning the Jewish bodies.
That was the horror of the system.
The archaeologists were expecting ashes.
And now they found scattered remains.
How did they make the decision to go for DNA typing?
It was a complicated process, in fact.
Because the archaeologists were sure that these burials they are made after the
war.
It was archaeological evidence, the archaeological analysis.
When the archaeologists work in the fields, they always analyze the layers of
the ground.
So they try to recreate the history of the place by analyzing the soil, by
analyzing the evidence.
Because they found in the grave the ashes.
So mixed together.
Mixed together with the bones.
And there was a very important testimony from U.S.
about people from the village of Sobibur.
They actually had a shooting in the 50s, right?
In the 50s.
So this was immediately connected to the criminal activity of the Stalinist
regime.
And it was not stupid idea.
Because, for example, Auschwitz was used by the communist regime after the war.
Nobody knows about that.
No one expects to hide the bodies there.
The places like this, the communist regime used, when we work in the August of,
we found
in the same place the victims of the Gestapo and then the victims of the
communist regime.
In the same place, we found two cousins.
One was killed by the Germans in 42 and one was killed by the communist regime
in 52.
In the same place.
And remember there were graves that were one on the other.
It seems that when the Stalinist regime, they were hiding the bodies, they
basically had
no space anymore.
They were digging into the graves of the Nazi victims and they were putting the
victims
on the back.
In the same grave, in the same grave, on the top of them.
Our archeologist, they can recognize them.
There was a very strong indication that the remains will be the victims of the
Stalinist
regime.
Yeah, and they suspect that they are Polish underground army members.
When we start on topology analysis, victims, they are too old for the Polish
underground
army.
In the instances, they are not typical for the military units.
Personal belongings.
Personal belongings.
We had the pocket knife, we had some leather shoes, but they had no real
indication of
what's a period of time they come from.
And the ammunition, which we found in the grave, they are typical ammunition
for the guards.
Even though we have to remember that the Polish activists, they also used the
same weapons
after the war.
So the people who were in the opposition, they were grabbing the old guards
from the Nazis
and they were just using them when they hiding in the forest.
I think it was very elemental to this project that you were able to get an
official order
for the analysis by the prosecutor in Lühring, right?
Yes, of course, without this we can't work.
It's huge work from the prosecutors.
When did you get this?
Was this before you did the morphological analysis?
No, it was coming together.
Yeah, it was when archaeologists found the graves, they informed the police and
the prosecutors.
Then it started to work the prosecutor of Polish IPN.
And we had a workflow in the project and the workflow included everything.
So we did the whole picture with the anthropology, the ballistic, the medical,
medical legal
analysis and then the DNA.
So we followed the same procedure as we always did in the project.
In the project of the Polish genetic database, every step is important.
If we use only archaeology or anthropology, we can say that they are from the
period of
the...
The best and it's like with a criminal investigation, you cannot analyze a
piece of DNA evidence
without knowing the crime itself.
This is the same, but here you have archaeologists and historians helping you
to shed light on
the DNA evidence that you get, but on the other hand, the DNA is also shedding
light on
history and archaeology.
And that was the time when finally the bones came to the Stadtine lab, right?
Where you guys started to clean the bones, do the extraction and start the DNA
typing
process.
Yes, we started the DNA typing process first of course anthropology and medical
forensic
and then we started the DNA.
We analyzed how the people were executed.
The conclusion was that the people were probably kneeling with their heads down
and they were
just shot in the back of their heads or neck.
Until the first moment we got mitochondrial DNA results, they were just victims
of Stadtine's
regime, we profiled them and then we got the mitochondrial DNA and it came as
well.
And it started.
When you are in Poland and you have an individual with K-Haplu group, it brings
a bell, right?
It brings a bell, that's true.
I remember when you guys called me about this K-Haplu group, mitochondrial DNA,
I was concerned
about the fact that all the matches that you got between the mitochondrial
sequences of
these skeletal remains and the m-pop, they were all stored under Ashkenachi
tools.
And from that moment I knew we need to pursue this.
We need to go from this hypermariable segments to the entire mitochondrial
regime.
Yeah, I remember it for three individuals for which we did Sanger, the best
prediction
we could do with HV1 and HV2 was K. This was not informative enough.
And the literature showed that all of the important mutations are out of our
range.
So we had to extend.
Even DNA in this moment, it was not 100% sure, it moved us a little bit to the
direction of
the victims of the Sobibur, but it's still the theory that they are victims of
the commercial
regime.
Yeah, we have two individuals with H-Haplu group, which is commonly found in
Poland.
So until we dig deeper into this, we were still not sure what we are really
looking at.
K1A and K1C, you cannot identify with HV1, HV2, K1B.
Exactly, yeah.
Because you need to know in HV3 what kind of mutation it is.
When we started to look into this and then we saw it's K1B, this was nourishing
the idea
that we are actually looking at people from Ashkenachi background.
And also the extract, they were so degraded, the Sanger just could not handle
it.
I remember that, yeah.
I mean the bones were pretty very researched, right?
They looked so, but the teeth looked so unhealthy.
It's typical in our project, sometimes the bones look very, very good and we
have a problem
with the DNA, but sometimes we have very degraded skeleton, and we get full
profile and in
the future amount of the DNA.
You can never know.
The place was not so good to prevent DNA, it's true.
It's all in the soil.
We know that they use the petrol.
And I remember when we did the DNA quantitation, we saw that despite the fact
that the bones
look good, the DNA is highly fragmented.
I remember this one individual with 60 copies of mitochondrial DNA, there was
barely anything
there.
These are the cases where you want to go for next generation sequencing.
Exactly.
Because then you can use these small fragments and go beyond the control region
, do the
anti-midogino.
This would have been possible 10 years ago.
Yeah.
So it's not only more phylogenical resolution, it's also the more sensitive
method.
It basically gave us everything we needed in this project.
The mitochondrial result was particularly important because in some Jewish
families or
populations, the maternal lineage is more important than the paternal lineage
with respect
to that they are belonging to the Jews, right?
Understanding who is Jewish, it's very complex, right?
Because it's religion, it's genetics, it's a history of your family.
There are many impacts on this and mitochondrial DNA is one of them.
Yeah, with one victim, we can't say anything.
If we have 10 victims, that we can say something.
First it was important to start the genetic sequencing.
Without this, we can say nothing more and then we start with the NY.
I remember correctly, you guys in Stadtine, you started off with capillary
testing, right?
Yes, with the ISTRs.
Remind me the matching that you guys did.
That was already pointing at some Jewish origin of those remains in the early
analysis.
So we did the prediction.
Yes, we did the prediction.
We did the prediction.
And it looks like some of them.
It was reading the bell again if you see in an assumed Polish individual's J1-A
haplog
group.
And it's definitely something that you do not expect to see, even if it's only
a prediction.
But it was the sign that we should go a little bit further.
I remember this was the reason why we decided to sequence the SNPs in order to
confirm the
haplogroom.
And I think one of the best results that we got was this córgenem...
Córgen model haplotype.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
This was something.
This was another observation when you see the haplotypes and you see that four
individuals
have the same haplotype.
This is in forensics the first idea is, oh, they are related.
But in the Jewish community it doesn't have to be so.
Which reminds me about mitochondria DNA where we also had two individuals.
They had the same mitochondria genome.
So the antimatter convergent was the same sequence, which suggests that they
may be
closely related.
One of them was in grave six, which was the grave with more of the skeletal
remains.
It was a mass grave, yes.
And the other one was in the grave where the single person was lying who needed
to bury
the other individuals.
This was the shallow where grave.
There was one grave which was shallow.
So the indication was that...
We suspect that it was the last person who was responsible for closing the rest
of the
grave.
And this last person was probably burying his relative with the same mitochond
ria genome.
It's possible.
However, when you look at the mitochondrial genomes that are available, you
find 100%
of the images, and it only shows how in such small ethnic groups, how the line
ages are
not as unique and specific as you would assume them to be.
So on one hand, when you have the K1A lineage and you compare them with the
poles, you think,
okay, you cannot find it here.
Then you compare it with other Ashkenazu Jews of unknown origin and you have a
full match.
It's such a strong evidence with such a specific ethnic group.
Everything fell into place when we started to look at the literature, right?
Yes.
Looking at the databases and looking at the different genealogies, all these
genetic
signals, you find mostly in Ashkenazi and rarely somewhere else.
How was the situation when you were conveying the results to the prosecutor?
This was your contact person, right?
You were giving the results back to the prosecutor first.
Yeah, they were very, very surprised.
It still was the story that they are the victims of the communism regime.
For them, it was something new that we gave them the genetic evidence.
Nobody before in Poland make like this.
That was very important.
That was the time when we returned the remains to the Rabi.
It was a decision that they should be buried.
Exactly where?
They were found in the camp.
In the presence of Rabi's.
Yes, they came back to the place where they were murdered and buried like they
should
be buried.
Yeah, exactly what the Jewish writes with all of their respects.
They only came back as we mentioned before that the burial of the Jewish
remains should
not be disturbed.
So they just came there again, but with all of the respect.
What was special about this project was also the way how we got the reviews
from the paper,
remember?
When we decided to go for genome biology rather than a forensic journal, I was
not sure what
kind of reviews we would get.
It was sort of heartbreaking to get this one reviewer who first he gave very
technical
comments, good ones, which we were happy to take up.
And then he was telling his story and that all of his family died in the
Holocaust.
That was quite a touching moment, which I probably of course never had in the
past and
probably we never have in the future.
That's also the special thing about this project when it comes to the
publication.
I have to agree.
I never got reviews that were personal already.
Okay, the reviews can be bad or good, but sometimes they are not absolutely
objective,
but you never get this type of message hidden in a review, this personal
message.
It was very important because it show us that our work makes sense.
This journal has a wide outreach.
The social impact is incredible.
We keep on getting comments from the community, from different fields, even
outside forensics.
I think it was a good decision to publish it like that despite the fact that it
's a very
sad story really.
I think that this was the moment we felt that as forensics scientists we can
bring something
that no one expected us to do.
So we showed how all of those fields they came together and how important it is
for us
to just edit this last brick that is missing in this to really build the story.
So it would not be able without the forensic evidence.
I think that some did not expect forensic scientists to do such work.
I think that many were surprised that we are forensic scientists doing this.
We work for the criminal cases, sometimes historical cases, but no one expected
us to
bring this story to life.
I think that's the relevance.
I mean, that is our contribution to the field, right?
We should not forget Holocaust.
In a society we cannot forget this.
As a scientist, being able to contribute to this was really a satisfying moment
for me.
And we show that new direction of the forensic work, but not only in the
forensic work, through
so new direction in the archaeology that after so many years we can get new
proof.
Human identification is what we do.
We are used to identify victims.
And I think what is important is that we as forensic scientists, we should
never doubt
and never hesitate in identifying the victims.
The victims have to be identified.
We should not think about the nationality.
We should not think about who the people were, all of the victims.
They deserve to be identified.
And we have the tools to do this.
It's the first time in history.
So many years we are not able to identify them.
We are not able even to say who they are, which community they are.
And now we have new tools and we can use it and we should use it.
And that's the beauty of research.
I mean, this literature and the data that we used to identify the fact that
they were
Ashkenazi Jews, they didn't build their studies for this purpose.
They did it because they were interested in the research.
And I think that's the beauty in research.
At some point it falls together and we can take advantage of work that has been
done before
to complete our identification.
New tools and new technology gave us new opportunities for all victims which we
try
to identify in the future.
What is exciting about forensic science is that we have forensics and science.
So on one hand we are able to use methods to solve crimes.
On the other hand we have methods to solve historical mysteries.
And we can bring it all together.
We can bring closure.
We can bring answers.
We can shed light.
We have so much power in our hands to make this world better on the actual
basis and
also from the historical point.
Being a scientist in these days is an exciting time.
The technology is very strong throughout the past 20 years.
Forensics has always been benefiting of technologically-wence.
Solving crime, finding perpetrators, identifying victims is depending on the
technology that
we have at hand.
These exciting times currently even go over the top because now we are changing
from identification
of remains to prediction.
And this predictive element will bring a lot of new information into forensic
genetics
which I am personally very excited to see and excited to be part of.
Walter and Dee, thank you for this collaboration.
It was great working with you on this project which I think none of us expected
to become
such a great project in the end.
And all of you, thank you for joining us for this session where we were able to
show you
that forensic science is not only about solving crime.
It is also about bringing closure to the victims of war conflicts, of military
conflicts, of
people who are identified for over 80 years.
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