Continued from Part 1

Thanks to the Vicar
Zbigniew Kasprzak is particularly thankful to Vicar Svend Jacobsen, the Vicar of Slaglille during the years of war. The Germans did not want the Polish soldiers to have proper graves or any ceremony. The vicar made a complaint to the bishop, and from the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs it went to the Plenipotentiary of the German Reich to Denmark Dr. Werner Best. Svend Jacobsen got the names via Best. The grave-digger knew where the Germans had dumped them into the ground, and on 30 September 1943 Svend Jacobsen, the grave-digger and two helpers opened the plot to make it more suitable. On 30 November the bodies were disinterred and put into coffins, and after a ceremony they were interred again. Shipowner A.P. Møller paid for the burial.

We are incredibly thankful that they had a decorous and proper burial, Zbigniew Kasprzak states.

The families in Poland did not learn what had happened until in 1946, when a Polish monk in Denmark informed them. Till then they only had a telegram from the Royal Air Force stating that their loved ones were missing in action.

Three Germans died
This year the Polish Embassy has paid for the cleaning of the monument to the airmen which has been in Slaglille Churchyard since 1970. The monument was created by the Polish sculptor Kasimierz Danilewicz on the initiative of surviving prisoners of the Stutthof Concentration Camp.

Vicar Anders Frederiksen and the Catholic priest Julian Bodnar carried out the memorial ceremony.

The disaster also included three killed Germans, as the German plane also crashed – but that is a completely different story.

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