At the end of last year we published an interactive portal „Zamojszczyzna”, which is part of the idea spread within the framework of the „Layers of Memory” project.
The „Zamojszczyzna” layer brings closer information about the areas of the Zamosc County where civilians were exterminated in order for the Germans to exploit and settle these very attractive areas of Poland.
As part of the project, research was carried out with the aim of developing a theoretical legal model for holding civilian responsibility of the German state, whose functionaries committed crimes during World War II (in particular, genocide, mass murder, torture but also looting and destruction of property, repression of families of murdered prisoners, persecution of Poles as „subhumans”, etc.).
The study was aimed at answering the question of whether it is legally possible to bring individual civil litigation for crimes committed against Poles during World War II. The project gathered information on previous court rulings in similar cases around the world, rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, and legal options for seeking compensation.
The research is characterized by a groundbreaking and innovative approach, due to the fact that it has not been conducted on such a large scale before, and this knowledge has never been compiled in one place and made available to a wider audience. This is because it is important to distinguish between the pursuit of individual compensation for losses suffered during World War II and state investigations (for there have been several of these over several decades, but we remain critical of their level of detail, especially when it comes to specific regions of occupied Poland).
For this reason, the Polish League Against Defamation undertook to conduct this type of research „on its own” focusing in the first stage on the Zamojszczyzna area in 1939-1945. This is because the area was located within the General Government created by Germany and was subjected to unprecedented pacification and displacement actions. The occupier carried out a plan of displacement, the denationalization of these lands and the replacement of the indigenous Polish population, with the German population, often by means of extermination. It was carried out under the name of the „General Plan East.” 293 villages, about 100-110,000 people including 30,000 children, were subjected to deportation, often to be subjected to Germanization. In addition, like many other Polish lands under German occupation, Zamojszczyzna, was subjected to unprecedented looting of property, cultural goods, forced deportation for labor to Germany or to camps, and, finally, destruction caused by warfare, as well as the extermination activities of the occupiers.
In the case of German crimes committed against Poles, most of the perpetrators were not tried, they lived out their days in peace, often in exposed positions. Hence the need to examine the possibility of holding Germany (as the legal heir of the Third Reich) responsible for the crimes and looting committed by its citizens against Poles during World War II. This issue has not been studied at all so far, due to the complexity of the subject matter, meanwhile, in the world at the beginning of the 21st century, there were a number of trials in which victims of crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, mass murders, massacres, etc.) obtained reparations or compensation, for example, for lost property.
As part of the project, a visualization of the places of war crimes, executions of Zamojszczyzna residents, and places of looting of Polish property, as well as cultural property, was realized for educational purposes and the dissemination of knowledge on the subject studied, and then made available to all audiences as a portal, along with a mobile application, showing the scale of damage to individual Polish citizens suffered during World War II.
The completed project serves both as a compendium of historical knowledge, as well as a functional and intuitive tool for locating family members and efficiently calculating the compensation due as the basis for a claim related to property taken or moral losses suffered during the displacement or extermination of loved ones.
Maps are also an important part of the project, allowing interactive viewing of the data of individual villages and municipalities, while a key aspect of the project is the ability to view individual data and the described methodology for the valorization and conversion into contemporary value of the damages of individual Polish citizens, Zamość County, suffered during the German aggression and occupation during World War II.
The stratagem is designed to show the scale of the phenomenon, but most importantly, it provides an opportunity to analyse and verify the situation by any resident of Zamosc County whose family suffered wrongs during World War II. It also gives the opportunity to calculate compensation for the damage suffered, the amount of which has been determined personally and is available in the panel „after logging in”.
Each person registering on the site has the opportunity to analyse the data on his family’s losses with an itemized value for a specific damage, as well as an aggregate summary giving a picture of what total amount is due to the family.
We invite you to visit the website https://rdi.org.pl/english/zamojszczyzna-polskie-reparacje-indywidualne-od-panstwa-niemieckiego-za-podejmowane-zbrodnie/ , a layer devoted to the presentation of individual damages of Polish citizens of Zamosc County, incurred during the German aggression and occupation during World War II, to learn more about the portal and download the mobile application, which can also be downloaded from Google play.
Scientific work financed from the state budget within the framework of the program of the Ministry of Education and Science called „Science for Society”, project number Nd5/545251/2022/2022
