page_title: Jedwabne pogrom
section_title: Findings
hierarchical_section_title: Jedwabne pogrom / Later inquiries / Polish government investigation, 2000–2003 / Findings
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Pomnik upamiętniający męczeńską śmierć Żydów z Jedwabnego, zamordowanych 10 lipca 1941r. Zginęli w różny sposób, jednakże najbardziej poruszająca jest śmierć tych, którzy spłonęli w stodole, co symbolizują wmurowane z przodu pomnika nadpalone drzwi. Zarys stodoły wyznaczają ustawione wokół kamienne bloki. Na obelisku napis: Pamięci Żydów z Jedwabnego i okolic, mężczyzn, kobiet, dzieci, współgospodarzy tej ziemi, zamordowanych, żywcem spalonych w tym miejscu 10 lipca 1941 roku.
context_page_description: The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust.
  At least 340 men, women and children were murdered, some 300 of whom were locked in a barn which was then set on fire. About 40 non-Jewish Poles were implicated as being perpetrators of the massacre. German military police were present in the town at the time.
  The massacre occurred among many others in the Podlasie region with the arrival of German troops shortly after their 21 June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, which had until then occupied Jedwabne in an 20-month reign of terror since the Hitler-Stalin Pact divided Poland in 1939. The killers at Jedwabne used the negative stereotype of "Jewish Communism" against their victims. Prior to the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, Jedwabne had been located in an area which favored the National Party, an anti-Semitic bloc opposed to the prewar Polish government, which outlawed its radical violent wing in 1934.
context_section_description: On 9 July 2002 the IPN issued a press release on the findings of its two-year investigation, signed by the chief prosecutor, Radosław J. Ignatiew. The IPN found that at least 340 Jews had been killed in the pogrom, in two groups. The first group consisted of 40 to 50 men, who were murdered before the barn was set on fire. The second group consisted of about 300 people of "both sexes of various ages, including children and infants". The second group was "led into a wooden, thatched barn owned by Bronisław Śleszyński. After the building had been closed, it was doused, probably with kerosene from the former Soviet warehouse." The exact number of victims could not be determined. The previously estimated figure of 1,600 "seems highly unlikely, and was not confirmed in the course of the investigation".
  The report conclued that the perpetrators of the crime sensu stricto ("in the strict sense") were about 40 male "Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne and its environs". Responsibility for the crime sensu largo ("in the broad sense") could be ascribed to the Germans because of the presence of German military policemen at the Jedwabne police station. Their presence, "though passive, was tantamount to consent to and tolerance of the crime against the Jewish inhabitants of the town".
  Several witnesses had testified that uniformed Germans had arrived in the town that day and drove the group of Jews to the market place. IPN could neither conclusively prove nor disprove these accounts. "Witness testimonies vary considerably" on the question of whether the Germans took the Jews to the barn or were present there. The IPN found that the "Polish population" had played a "decisive role in the execution of the criminal plan". The IPN wrote: "On the basis of the evidence gathered in the investigation, it is not possible to determine the reasons for the passive behavior of the majority of the town's population in the face of the crime. In particular, it cannot be determined whether this passivity resulted from acceptance of the crime or from intimidation caused by the brutality of the perpetrators' acts."
  Leon Kieres delivered the IPN report to the Polish parliament. A small opposition party, the League of Polish Families (LPR) called him a "servant of the Jews" and blamed him and President Aleksander Kwaśniewski for "stoning the Polish nation". LPR MP Antoni Macierewicz made an official complaint against the IPN's conclusion that ethnic Poles and not the Germans had committed the massacre. A 203-page expanded version of the findings was issued by the IPN on 30 June 2003; pages 60–160 contained summaries of the testimonies of witnesses interviewed by the IPN. The report was supplemented by two volumes of studies and documents, Wokół Jedwabnego (Vol. 1: Studies, 525 pages, and Vol. 2: Documents, 1,034 pages. On 30 June 2003 Ignatiew announced that the investigation of "the mass murder of at least 340 Polish citizens of Jewish nationality in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941" had found no living suspects who had not already been brought to justice, and therefore the IPN investigation was closed.
caption: Jedwabne memorial, 2011
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