Report on the archaeological research of the camp in Mała Lipna conducted in 2024

<p>In July and August 2024, archaeological research was carried out at the site of the former prisoner-of-war camp in Mała Lipna, which operated in the buildings of a former sheepfold and was associated with Stalag 308 (Stalag VIII E). The site is remembered locally as the place where around 300 Soviet POWs were held and buried in the adjacent forest.</p><p>In the second half of the 1960s, the Okręgowa Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich (Regional Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes) documented three elongated mass graves and exhumed 22 individuals. Later attempts to relocate the cemetery were hindered by an imprecise archival sketch and by postwar changes to the course of the forest road indicated as the burial line. Additional difficulties for geophysical prospection were caused by ferromagnetic debris masking potential grave signatures.</p><p>The 2024 program combined non-invasive methods with test excavations, confirming the burial zone along and beneath the present forest road and exposing a mass grave containing the remains of at least five individuals. Among the finds was an identification tag stamped “Stalag I B 2747,” which linked one of the victims to Stalag I B (Hohenstein/Olsztynek).</p><p>The fieldwork was conducted by staff and students of the Department of Anthropology, Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences, within the project <em>“Bioarchaeology and the Archaeology of Nazi Landscapes of Repression: A Central-Eastern European Perspective.”</em> The project is funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (project no. 2021/43/I/HS3/02072), under the OPUS 22, WEAVE program (2023–2026).</p>