The Last Great Escape: Recovery of 1st Lt. Ewart Sconiers, an American World War II Bombardier Imprisoned at the Stalag Luft III POW Camp

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Applying the Power of Partnerships to the Search for America's Missing in Action" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Like many recoveries, locating 1st Lt. Ewart Sconiers required research, persistence, and good old-fashioned luck. While imprisoned at the Stalag Luft III POW camp in German-occupied Poland, complications from an injury sent Sconiers to a hospital in a neighboring town—where he died. His burial occurred in a nearby municipal cemetery. During the Russian occupation of Poland, aboveground cemetery features were “erased” and memories of the American POW’s grave faded. In 2012, Ohio Valley Archaeology Inc. (OVAI) volunteered its time and equipment to conduct a geophysical survey in the cemetery, now a park in Lubin, Poland. Results of the survey work, along with World War II-era aerial photography and graveside imagery, identified two areas of interest excavated by OVAI in 2015 under contract with DPAA. Trench 1 at the edge of the cemetery uncovered the graves of infants. Trench 2 revealed 14 burials within or scattered between seven graves. Bone distribution patterns and evidence of an intrusive trench excavation suggested an upper set of graves had been removed. Concurrent with our excavations, Sconiers’ headstone was discovered in a recently posted online photograph from a French military cemetery in Gdansk, Poland. A positive identification was then confirmed by DPAA’s DNA tests.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Applying the Power of Partnerships to the Search for America's Missing in Action   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32717