Polish archaeologists on Thursday said they found five skeletons missing their hands and feet underneath a house once used by Nazi potentate Hermann Goering.
Goering was the head of the Luftwaffe, the German air force.
The house was in the Wolf’s Lair complex, the Nazi headquarters on the eastern front constructed in Gierloz, which today is in Poland.
Zenon Piotrowicz, manager of the Srokowo Forest District that operates the Wolf’s Lair site, told the Polish Press Agency that while archaeologists were searching where the floor of Goering’s house used to be, they found the remains.
The skeletal remains of a baby, a child about 10 years old and three adults were found, all lacking hands and feet and with no normal burial artifacts, such as belt buckles, buttons and the remains of clothing.
The local police and prosecutor’s office determined that they were killed during World War II. Mr. Piotrowicz suggested they could have been German-speaking victims of the Soviet security agency NKVD, a predecessor to the KGB.
“The findings … are that these are war-related victims. … The key to solving this mystery would be to determine the date of burial: whether it comes from the 1920s, 1940 or 1945,” he said.
Questions remain as to why the presumed family was buried there as opposed to a cemetery.
Oktavian Bartoszewski, a member of the Latebra Foundation archaeological team, told The Times of London, “There is a cemetery nearby, but why would a family be buried here rather than there? There was also a lunatic asylum near here, and one of the skeletons had a deformed jaw and a twisted spine.”
The archaeologists and investigators are trying to figure out why the five victims had their extremities cut off.
“There are many theories (about) why they do not have hands and feet. Right now, it’s very hard to say,” Adrian Kostrzewa, another member of the archaeological team, told CNN.