Using Geophysical Survey to Relocate Missing World War II-Era American Graves and a Large Postwar Unmarked Cemetery near Stalag Luft VI, a German POW Camp in Macikai, Lithuania

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1944, on separate occasions, three US military airman died while interned at the Stalag Luft VI German prisoner-of-war camp in what is now the Village of Macikai, Lithuania. All three were interred in a small burial area, along with at least one other (a Canadian airman), located outside the camp perimeter fence. While accounts of this burial area’s location, along with ground-based photographs, are readily available, its exact location has been lost since the war. In 2019, in partnership with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Ohio Valley Archaeology Inc. was tasked with locating the American burials by conducting geophysical surveys on three areas selected based on burial detail accounts. Ground-penetrating radar and magnetic gradiometry were used to survey all three areas (2.8 ha). Probable and possible graves were detected in three locations, including in a small area consistent with the burial accounts and a large triangular area with at least 1,000 previously unknown graves. Subsequent excavations have (1) confirmed the presence of graves, (2) resulted in the recovery of the three Americans, and (3) confirmed the presence of a large, previously unknown postwar cemetery associated with the Russian gulag that repurposed Stalag Luft VI.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37866.0