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It looks like a normal muddy forest path in the Sauerland.
But where scientists presented their research results to the public in March 2019, members of the Waffen SS and Wehrmacht shot 56 forced laborers and a small child shortly before the end of World War II.
In Warstein-Suttrop.
A memorial stone commemorates the murder.
Archaeologists dug there until the beginning of 2019 after intensive historical preliminary investigations.
Likewise at two other execution sites in the Arnsberg Forest, where a total of 208 Polish and Russian slave laborers were murdered in March 1945.
A memorial stone commemorates the forced laborers who were shot in Warstein-Suttrop
Source: dpa
The experts brought more than 400 finds out of the ground.
In many cases the victims' last belongings are small: fragments of a harmonica, a glasses case, a Polish prayer book and a dictionary, Soviet coins, shoes, clothing, dishes, a spoon, buttons.
The objects are important testimonies, they tell of the murdered, as Matthias Löb, director of the municipal landscape association Westphalia-Lippe (LWL) says: "It is practically their last message."
The excavations also provided important information about the perpetrators, their approach, their way of thinking and their “movement profiles”.
It becomes clear that the procedure was different at all three execution sites, as LWL archaeologist Manuel Zeiler explains.
Iron splinters have shown that a pit was blown in the ground at a crime scene.
Projectiles and weapon parts were discovered in it.
Elsewhere, cartridge cases show that some of the forced laborers tried to escape.
Vain.
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The models for the massacres were the mass murders that the SS mobile task forces carried out on the Eastern Front from 1941 onwards.
In the Arnsberg Forest, an association made up of the Waffen SS and the Wehrmacht under the command of SS General Hans Kammler was given the task of “decimating foreign workers”.
These had previously been driven by the authorities from the cities of the Ruhr area destroyed by bombs on marches to the east.
Since there were not enough accommodation options in the Meschede area, many were able to flee into the woods.
The American troops learned of two mass graves shortly after the liberation, reports LWL historian Marcus Weidner.
A US commander ordered former NSDAP members to exhume the bodies;
the population had to pass them by.
A third mass grave was not discovered until 1947.
80 forced laborers were killed there.
The victims were mostly women, says Weidner.
The bones discovered before the new excavations had shown "how young many victims were".
Many were missing parts of the skull bones, a result of being shot in the neck.
The killed slave laborers were accidental victims, the historian interprets the find.
Coming from the west, they were stranded in the Sauerland - in the hope of surviving the war there.
Memorial stone in Warstein-Suttrop
Source: dpa
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Most of the victims are buried in a forest cemetery in Meschede.
According to Weidner, the legal processing of the crimes had started in 1957 before the Arnsberg district court, where the verdict against only a few defendants was "scandalously low".
Only in the appeal proceedings did the judges convict some of the perpetrators for murder.
The experts have now managed to identify 14 victims.
“We try to identify the relatives.” The research results should be communicated to a broad population.
It is conceivable to merge the crime scenes into a “memory trail”.
Löb emphasizes that the new findings are helping to “further clarify” the cruel murder campaigns of the SS.
This is important in several respects, because for some years there have been attempts to downplay or deny the crimes of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship.
One lesson from the Sauerland finds is that a "line of thought" is forbidden.
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This article was first published in March 2019.