In the Shadow of the Crematoria: Investigating Mass Atrocities in Poland, 1944–1945

This article reconstructs the founding of Poland’s Main Commission to Investigate German War Crimes and situates Polish investigatory efforts within the broader context of the major Allied war crimes commissions. In doing so, it analyzes how these commissions conceptualized victims and perpetrators as members of larger collectivities as one of the practical necessities of investigating and producing “truth” about mass atrocities. For Poland, investigating mass atrocities and classifying victims and perpetrators was complicated not only by the specific geography of mass atrocities but also by socialist regime transition, a period of politico-legal flux in which government-sponsored projects dedicated to the investigation and production of knowledge about mass atrocities became the foundation for new truths about political and national belongingness. As efforts to classify victims and perpetrators evolved over a series of investigations that started with the Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau camps and culminated in the creation of the Main Commission, postwar Poland’s foundational truth about the “right” to a collective national identity came into focus.