Radzilów
Encyclopedia
Radziłów r is a village
(formerly a town) in Grajewo County
, Podlaskie Voivodeship
, in north-eastern Poland. It is the seat of the gmina
, an administrative district called Gmina Radziłów. It lies approximately 27 kilometres (17 mi) south of Grajewo
and 61 km (38 mi) north-west of the regional capital Białystok. In 2007 the village had a population of 1,267.
. The first settlers arrived in the Middle Ages
and began clearing the impenetrable forest. Masovian Dukes, who owned the area, issued the rights to enter the forest and harvest it. Among the first settlers were bee-keepers, fishermen, hunters and loggers, who sold honey, wax, fish and lumber to neighboring towns, Wizna
and Goniądz
. The lumber was also transported via Biebrza
and Ełk river waterways to Gdańsk
.
The founding of the city took a long time. Radziłów was formally established by Prince Konrad III, with Kazimierz III, Bolesław V and Janusz II, who gave it the city rights on May 9, 1466. The town began to flourish in the 16th century. Located at a trading route between Wizna and Wąsosz
, it became a commercial center for bakers, shoemakers, tailors, butchers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, cooper-makers and potters. The main square in Radziłów at the time (180 m × 120 m in size) was bigger than in Warsaw
(70 m × 94 m) and in Płock (140 m × 70 m) and held two weekly markets, on Monday and on Sunday (from 17th century on) as well as a fair on Wednesday added by king Władysław IV in 1641. The majority of inhabitants lived off farming.
Following the partitions of Poland and after the January Uprising
, the Tsarist authorities changed the administrative divisions of Congress Poland
placing Radziłów in the Łomża province. In 1869 the town was stripped of its town charter and became the village; however the population was steadily increasing due to Russian repressions against Jews some of whom found refuge in the area. The Jewish merchants expanded local trade, established breweries, small craft and various services. Following the rebirth of Poland
after World War I
, two new public schools were established employing ten teachers, and two Jewish schools.
at the end of September in accordance with the German–Soviet Boundary Treaty and remained in Soviet hands until Operation Barbarossa
in July 1941. Polish administration was dismantled and replaced with local Jews some of whom abused their new position in relationships with Poles, causing other Jews to condemn this. Soviet-armed Jewish militiamen helped NKVD
agents send Polish families into exile. Soon after the German attack on USSR, a few hundred Jews were massacred in the town. Many were shot, but most were herded into a barn and burned alive on 7 July 1941 by the Gestapo
Einsatzgruppe B (Zichenau-Schroettersburg) under SS-Obersturmführer
Hermann Schaper. The methods used in the massacre were identical to those employed by Schaper's death squad
to kill Jews in Jedwabne
(a few kilometers distance) only three days later.
The war crimes committed by Schaper were investigated in 1964 by the German Judicial Centre for Prosecuting Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg
. The prosecutors called a key witness, the German Kreiskommissar who named Hermann Schaper in the course of Birkner
's investigation. Schaper was charged with personally directing the Einsatzkommando responsible for the mass killing of Jews in the city.
During his investigation Schaper lied to interrogators that in 1941 he had been a truck driver and used false names. The case against him for the murder of Jews in Radziłów was remitted by the prosecutor in Hamburg in 1965. His case was reopened in 1974, when the Nazi German administrator, Count van der Groeben testified that indeed Schaper's men conducted mass executions of Jews in his district. In 1976 a German court in Giesen
(Hessen), pronounced Schaper guilty of executions of Poles and Jews by the kommando SS Zichenau
-Schroettersburg. Schaper was sentenced to six-years imprisonment, but was soon released for medical reasons. In 2010 Polish Institute of National Remembrance
conducted its own investigation of the Radziłów crime and requested access to the documents of the Hamburg case but according to the German side, these were most probably destroyed after his case was terminated. The IPN investigation was suspended due to lack of hard evidence, and only a short statement issued about its initial objectives, implicating Polish participation in the
pogrom.
An earlier Polish monument in Radziłów reads, "In August 1941 fascists murdered 800 persons of Jewish descent, 500 of them were burned alive in a barn." The date on the monument is incorrect but historical research confirms that Jews were killed in Radziłów on July 7, how many, and under what circumstances, remains unknown. It is possible that the scenario might have been similar to that of the Jedwabne pogrom
, with victims burned in a barn of a man called Mitkowski.
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...
(formerly a town) in Grajewo County
Grajewo County
Grajewo County is a unit of territorial administration and local government in Podlaskie Voivodeship, north-eastern Poland. It came into being on January 1, 1999, as a result of the Polish local government reforms passed in 1998. Its administrative seat and largest town is Grajewo, which lies ...
, Podlaskie Voivodeship
Podlaskie Voivodeship
Podlaskie Voivodeship , is a voivodeship in northeastern Poland. It borders on Masovian Voivodeship to the west, Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship to the northwest, Lublin Voivodeship to the south, the Belarusssian Voblasts of Grodno and Brest to the east, the Lithuanian Counties of Alytus and...
, in north-eastern Poland. It is the seat of the gmina
Gmina
The gmina is the principal unit of administrative division of Poland at its lowest uniform level. It is often translated as "commune" or "municipality." As of 2010 there were 2,479 gminas throughout the country...
, an administrative district called Gmina Radziłów. It lies approximately 27 kilometres (17 mi) south of Grajewo
Grajewo
Grajewo , is a town in north-eastern Poland with 23,302 inhabitants .It is situated in the Podlaskie Voivodeship ; previously, it was in Łomża Voivodeship...
and 61 km (38 mi) north-west of the regional capital Białystok. In 2007 the village had a population of 1,267.
History
The history of Radziłów is closely connected with the history of Masovia Province from before the Partitions of PolandPartitions of Poland
The Partitions of Poland or Partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth took place in the second half of the 18th century and ended the existence of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, resulting in the elimination of sovereign Poland for 123 years...
. The first settlers arrived in the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
and began clearing the impenetrable forest. Masovian Dukes, who owned the area, issued the rights to enter the forest and harvest it. Among the first settlers were bee-keepers, fishermen, hunters and loggers, who sold honey, wax, fish and lumber to neighboring towns, Wizna
Wizna
Wizna is a village in Łomża County of Podlaskie Voivodeship, in north-eastern Poland. The Biebrza River flows through town. Wizna is also known for the battle of Wizna which took place in its vicinity during the 1939 Invasion of Poland. At present, farming and food production are the primary...
and Goniądz
Goniadz
Goniądz is a town in Poland, located at the Biebrza river, in Mońki county in Podlaskie Voivodeship in northeastern Poland. 80% of the town was destroyed in World War II...
. The lumber was also transported via Biebrza
Biebrza
Biebrza is a river in north-eastern Poland, a tributary of the Narew river , with a length of 155 kilometres and the basin area of 7,057 km2...
and Ełk river waterways to 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 founding of the city took a long time. Radziłów was formally established by Prince Konrad III, with Kazimierz III, Bolesław V and Janusz II, who gave it the city rights on May 9, 1466. The town began to flourish in the 16th century. Located at a trading route between Wizna and Wąsosz
Wasosz
Wąsosz is a town in Góra County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, in south-western Poland. It is the seat of the administrative district called Gmina Wąsosz. Prior to 1945 it was in Germany....
, it became a commercial center for bakers, shoemakers, tailors, butchers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, cooper-makers and potters. The main square in Radziłów at the time (180 m × 120 m in size) was bigger than in Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
(70 m × 94 m) and in Płock (140 m × 70 m) and held two weekly markets, on Monday and on Sunday (from 17th century on) as well as a fair on Wednesday added by king Władysław IV in 1641. The majority of inhabitants lived off farming.
Following the partitions of Poland and after the January Uprising
January Uprising
The January Uprising was an uprising in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth against the Russian Empire...
, the Tsarist authorities changed the administrative divisions of Congress Poland
Congress Poland
The Kingdom of Poland , informally known as Congress Poland , created in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, was a personal union of the Russian parcel of Poland with the Russian Empire...
placing Radziłów in the Łomża province. In 1869 the town was stripped of its town charter and became the village; however the population was steadily increasing due to Russian repressions against Jews some of whom found refuge in the area. The Jewish merchants expanded local trade, established breweries, small craft and various services. Following the rebirth of Poland
Second Polish Republic
The Second Polish Republic, Second Commonwealth of Poland or interwar Poland refers to Poland between the two world wars; a period in Polish history in which Poland was restored as an independent state. Officially known as the Republic of Poland or the Commonwealth of Poland , the Polish state was...
after World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, two new public schools were established employing ten teachers, and two Jewish schools.
World War II atrocities
During the German invasion of Poland, the Nazi 3rd Army entered Radziłów on September 7, 1939. The area was transferred to the Soviet UnionSoviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
at the end of September in accordance with the German–Soviet Boundary Treaty and remained in Soviet hands until Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
in July 1941. Polish administration was dismantled and replaced with local Jews some of whom abused their new position in relationships with Poles, causing other Jews to condemn this. Soviet-armed Jewish militiamen helped NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
agents send Polish families into exile. Soon after the German attack on USSR, a few hundred Jews were massacred in the town. Many were shot, but most were herded into a barn and burned alive on 7 July 1941 by the Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
Einsatzgruppe B (Zichenau-Schroettersburg) under SS-Obersturmführer
Obersturmführer
Obersturmführer was a paramilitary rank of the Nazi party that was used by the SS and also as a rank of the SA. Translated as “Senior Assault Leader”, the rank of Obersturmführer was first created in 1932 as the result of an expansion of the Sturmabteilung and the need for an additional rank in...
Hermann Schaper. The methods used in the massacre were identical to those employed by Schaper's death squad
Death squad
A death squad is an armed military, police, insurgent, or terrorist squad that conducts extrajudicial killings, assassinations, and forced disappearances of persons as part of a war, insurgency or terror campaign...
to kill Jews in Jedwabne
Jedwabne
Jedwabne is a town in Poland, in the Podlaskie Voivodeship, in Łomża County, with 1,942 inhabitants .- History :First mentioned in 1455, Jedwabne received city rights on July 17, 1736, from the Polish king August III, including the right to hold weekly markets on Sundays and five country fairs a...
(a few kilometers distance) only three days later.
The war crimes committed by Schaper were investigated in 1964 by the German Judicial Centre for Prosecuting Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg
Ludwigsburg
Ludwigsburg is a city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, about north of Stuttgart city centre, near the river Neckar. It is the largest and primary city of the Ludwigsburg urban district with about 87,000 inhabitants...
. The prosecutors called a key witness, the German Kreiskommissar who named Hermann Schaper in the course of Birkner
Wolfgang Birkner
SS-Hauptsturmführer Wolfgang Birkner was a Nazi war criminal and Holocaust perpetrator. He was a member of the NSDAP party with card number 3,601,309, and...
's investigation. Schaper was charged with personally directing the Einsatzkommando responsible for the mass killing of Jews in the city.
"The evidence collected by the West Germans, including the positive identification of Schaper by witnesses from Łomża, Tykocin, and Radziłów, suggested that it was indeed Schaper's men who carried out the killings in those locations. Investigators also suspected, based on the similarity of the methods used to destroy the Jewish communities of Radziłów, TykocinTykocin pogromThe Tykocin massacre , of August 25, 1941, was the mass murder of Jewish residents of Tykocin in occupied Poland during World War II, soon after Nazi German attack on the Soviet Union.- Circumstances surrounding the massacre :...
, RutkiRutkiRutki may refer to the following places:*Rutki, Masovian Voivodeship *Rutki, Opole Voivodeship *Rutki, Pomeranian Voivodeship *Rutki, Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship...
, Zambrów, JedwabneJedwabne pogromThe Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941 during German occupation of Poland, was a massacre of at least 340 Polish Jews of all ages. These are the official findings of the Institute of National Remembrance, "confirmed by the number of victims in the two graves, according to the estimate of the...
, PiątnicaPiatnicaPiątnica is a village in Łomża County, Podlaskie Voivodeship, in north-eastern Poland. It is the seat of gmina called Gmina Piątnica...
, and Wizna, between July and September 1941 that Schaper's men were the perpetrators." — Alexander B. RossinoAlexander B. RossinoAlexander B. Rossino , is a research historian at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. with Doctor of Philosophy from the Syracuse University in New York. He is best known for writing about Nazi Germany in World War II, the...
During his investigation Schaper lied to interrogators that in 1941 he had been a truck driver and used false names. The case against him for the murder of Jews in Radziłów was remitted by the prosecutor in Hamburg in 1965. His case was reopened in 1974, when the Nazi German administrator, Count van der Groeben testified that indeed Schaper's men conducted mass executions of Jews in his district. In 1976 a German court in Giesen
Giesen
Giesen is a village and a municipality in the district of Hildesheim, in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is situated approx. 6 km northwest of Hildesheim, and 22 km southeast of Hanover.The municipality includes five villages:* Ahrbergen...
(Hessen), pronounced Schaper guilty of executions of Poles and Jews by the kommando SS Zichenau
Ciechanów
Ciechanów is a town in north-central Poland with 45,900 inhabitants . It is situated in Masovian Voivodeship . It was previously the capital of Ciechanów Voivodeship.-History:The grad numbered approximately 3,000 armed men....
-Schroettersburg. Schaper was sentenced to six-years imprisonment, but was soon released for medical reasons. In 2010 Polish Institute of National Remembrance
Institute of National Remembrance
Institute of National Remembrance — Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation is a Polish government-affiliated research institute with lustration prerogatives and prosecution powers founded by specific legislation. It specialises in the legal and historical sciences and...
conducted its own investigation of the Radziłów crime and requested access to the documents of the Hamburg case but according to the German side, these were most probably destroyed after his case was terminated. The IPN investigation was suspended due to lack of hard evidence, and only a short statement issued about its initial objectives, implicating Polish participation in the
pogrom.
An earlier Polish monument in Radziłów reads, "In August 1941 fascists murdered 800 persons of Jewish descent, 500 of them were burned alive in a barn." The date on the monument is incorrect but historical research confirms that Jews were killed in Radziłów on July 7, how many, and under what circumstances, remains unknown. It is possible that the scenario might have been similar to that of the Jedwabne pogrom
Jedwabne pogrom
The Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941 during German occupation of Poland, was a massacre of at least 340 Polish Jews of all ages. These are the official findings of the Institute of National Remembrance, "confirmed by the number of victims in the two graves, according to the estimate of the...
, with victims burned in a barn of a man called Mitkowski.