History of Malbork

Near the end of the war, the city was declared a Festung and most of the civilian population fled or was evacuated, but some 4,000 people remained. In early 1945, Marienburg was the scene of fierce battles with the Red Army and almost completely destroyed. The battle lasted until March 9, 1945, and following the military capture by the Red Army, the remaining civilian population disappeared and 1,840 people remained missing. In June 1945, the town was turned over to Polish authorities who had arrived in the town in April, and permanently renamed Malbork.

Half a century later, in 1996, 178 corpses were found in a mass grave in Malbork; another 123 were found in 2005. In October 2008, during excavations for the foundation of a new hotel in Malbork, a mass grave was found containing the remains of 2,116 people, a majority of whom were female. All the dead were said to have been German residents of pre-1945 Marienburg, but they could not be individually identified, nor could the cause of their deaths be definitely established. A Polish investigation concluded that the bodies, along with the remains of some dead animals, may have buried to prevent the spread of typhus, which was extant in the turmoil at the end of World War II. On August 14, 2009, all the dead people’s remains were buried in a German military cemetery to the west at Stare Czarnowo (German: Neumark) in Polish Pomerania, not far from the present-day German border.

In Malbork one can also find a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery with 240 graves, mostly of POWs who died in the area during both wars, especially in the World War II Stalag XX-B camp.

After World War Two, the town was gradually