Piasnica - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Wielka Piaśnica ' is a village

Village

A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand , Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighbourhoods, such as the West Village in Manhattan, New...

in the administrative district of Gmina Puck

Gmina Puck

Gmina Puck is a rural gmina in Puck County, Pomeranian Voivodeship, in northern Poland. Its seat is the town of Puck, although the town is not part of the territory of the gmina....

, within Puck County

Puck County

Puck County is a unit of territorial administration and local government in Pomeranian Voivodeship, northern Poland, on the Baltic coast. It came into being on January 1, 1999, as a result of the Polish local government reforms passed in 1998. Its administrative seat is the town of Puck, which...

, Pomeranian Voivodeship

Pomeranian Voivodeship

Pomeranian Voivodeship, or Pomerania Province , is a voivodeship, or province, in north-central Poland. It comprises most of Pomerelia , as well as an area east of the Vistula River...

, in northern Poland. It lies approximately 14 kilometres (9 mi) west of Puck

Puck, Poland

Puck is a town in northwestern Poland with 11,350 inhabitants. It is in Gdańsk Pomerania on the south coast of the Baltic Sea . Previously in the Gdańsk Voivodeship , Puck has been the capital of Puck County in the Pomeranian Voivodeship since 1999.-History:The settlement became a marketplace...

and 46 km (29 mi) north-west of the regional capital Gdańsk

Gdansk

Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...

. The village has a population of 64.

After the 1939 Invasion of Poland, German

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

Schutzstaffel

The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...

from Danzig

Gdansk

(Gdańsk) and local Selbstschutz

Selbstschutz

Selbstschutz stands for two organisations:# A name used by a number of paramilitary organisations created by ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe# A name for self-defence measures and units in ethnic German, Austrian, and Swiss civil defence....

members executed about 12,000 civilians, mainly Polish and Kashubian

Kashubians

Kashubians/Kaszubians , also called Kashubs, Kashubes, Kaszubians, Kassubians or Cassubians, are a West Slavic ethnic group in Pomerelia, north-central Poland. Their settlement area is referred to as Kashubia ....

intelligentsia

Intelligentsia

The intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...

from the Pomeranian Voivodeship, in the Darżlubska

Puszcza Darżlubska

Puszcza Darżlubska or Lasy Piaśnickie , located in northernmost part of Poland, is a Polish forests complex on the Baltic Sea, within the geographical region of Pobrzeże Kaszubskie; on the south-side bordering the Tricity Landscape Park from which, it is separated by the Reda river...

forest next to the village. Among the victims were approximately 1,200 mentally ill persons from local hospitals, killed in the course of the Action T4

Action T4

Action T4 was the name used after World War II for Nazi Germany's eugenics-based "euthanasia" program during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination"...

.

The mass executions began in October 1939 and lasted until April 1940. An exhumation of mass grave

Mass grave

A mass grave is a grave containing multiple number of human corpses, which may or may not be identified prior to burial. There is no strict definition of the minimum number of bodies required to constitute a mass grave, although the United Nations defines a mass grave as a burial site which...

s was carried after World War II in 1946. Out of total number of 35 graves, 30 were localised of which 26 were exhumed. Only 305 bodies (in two mass graves) were found, the rest of the bodies was burnt by Germans in August–September 1944. Sonderkommandos (forced prison labourers) from Stutthof concentration camp

Stutthof concentration camp

Stutthof was the first Nazi concentration camp built outside of 1937 German borders.Completed on September 2, 1939, it was located in a secluded, wet, and wooded area west of the small town of Sztutowo . The town is located in the former territory of the Free City of Danzig, 34 km east of...

were used to cover up the tracks and were later executed.

See also