Lviv exhumation completed: remains of 132 Polish and German soldiers from 1939 found

What happened

Ukrainian and Polish specialists have completed exhumation work at Holoskivskyi Cemetery in Lviv. Lubomyr Horbach, head of the “Pamiat” (Memory) Society for the Search for War Victims, told Ukrinform the team recovered the remains of 115 Polish Army soldiers and 17 soldiers of the German Wehrmacht’s 1st Mountain Division who died in the battles for Lviv in autumn 1939.

“We are now filling in the graves and levelling the ground. Ukrainian and Polish anthropologists and forensic experts are continuing to study the remains and take samples for DNA testing,” Horbach said.

Historical background

In September 1939 the Wehrmacht and the Polish Army fought on the outskirts of Lviv, including in the area of Holosko Velyke. The Polish soldiers who fell there were buried in the local cemetery. As Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) notes, cited by the PAP news agency, Holosko Velyke became part of Lviv in 1958.

Searches in 2010 and 2019 identified 110–120 individual graves of Polish soldiers killed fighting German units that had encircled Lviv from the west and south. The current work began on August 25 with about 30 specialists from both countries.

What the scientists found

Olha Mineiko, an anthropologist at the “Dolia” memorial search centre, said all the remains belonged to men, most aged 20 to 30, with none older than 40. Judging by their teeth, some had only just been called up in the mobilisation of late August and early September 1939. Most bore gunshot and shrapnel wounds, mainly to the lower jaw, chest, ribs and arms, which she said shows they died in open combat.

Horbach said the graves were generally well preserved because the soil has low acidity, so even the smallest bones survived. Only the pits holding German soldiers had been partly damaged in Soviet times, when a water pipe was laid through the area.

The finds

The graves contained footwear, buttons, buckles, parts of uniform belts, metal helmets, watches, a pen, pencils, Catholic medallions and rosaries, and an Orthodox cross. By mid-September, according to the IPN as reported by PAP, 1,760 items had been logged.

The most valuable finds for identification are ID tags, which carried a soldier’s name, religion and year and place of birth. But only six were found among the Polish soldiers and six among the Germans; they were probably removed before burial. DNA will therefore be key: samples will go to a laboratory in Poland, and if relatives come forward, the dead can be named. “That is the most valuable part of our work,” Mineiko said.

What next

The Polish soldiers will be reburied at the cemetery in Mostyska, where about 200 Polish soldiers were already reburied in 2015–2016 and in 2025. The German remains will be handed to the German war graves commission and reburied at the collective military cemetery in the village of Potelych in the Lviv region.

The work followed agreements reached by the Ukrainian-Polish Working Group on National Remembrance and was carried out by the Pamiat society together with the IPN and Wrocław Medical University. According to Espreso.Zakhid, it is the second stage of joint research in Lviv: in 2025, the remains of 34 soldiers found in Zboishcha were reburied in Mostyska in November.