The remains of 17 soldiers of the Polish Army and seven German servicemen have been discovered and exhumed by a team of Ukrainian and Polish specialists during excavation and search operations at the Holoskivske Cemetery in Lviv.
Lubomyr Horbach, Head of the Pamiat (Memory) Society for Searching for War Victims, told Ukrinform.
“The burials are arranged in three rows, each 45–50 meters long. In the first row, which we have partially examined, we found about 20 burial pits. We exhumed the remains of six Polish Army servicemen from them. There are items confirming this: uniform buttons bearing the Polish coat of arms, various fasteners, hooks and rings characteristic of Polish soldiers’ equipment. We did not find any military identification devices, also known as dog tags, in these burials,” the head of the society said.
Search teams also exhumed from the first row the remains of seven soldiers from German armed formations, specifically the 1st Mountain Division of the German Wehrmacht, which was partly made up of Austrian citizens. Three of them had identification tags.
“We notified the German War Graves Commission in Ukraine about this. They immediately found in their archival records a list of German servicemen who died in Holoskiv, which gives dates of death ranging from September 14 to 20, 1939. We also know that Polish soldiers died during the same period. The German servicemen were buried among the Polish soldiers. They had no military equipment or weapons with them. All these indications suggest that local residents buried the dead after the fighting had ended, as the military units did not take the bodies with them,” Horbach said.
