Geophysical investigation of the Mila 18 resistance bunker in Warsaw, Poland

Abstract

The 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was an iconic act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. The Jewish ghetto in Warsaw was established by the Nazis in 1940 and was used to imprison the largest Jewish population seen anywhere in the war. Between April and May 1943, from the tiny 1.3 square miles of land allotted to the ghetto, Jewish resistance fighters, operating from underground networks of bunkers and tunnels, would fight the first major urban rebellion of the war. Today, many of these bunkers and tunnels have been destroyed and replaced by rebuilding after the war or by modern development. However, one of the main resistance bunkers at the Mila 18 site was not built over, and offers a unique opportunity to conduct non-invasive surveys to search for subsurface evidence of the bunker and tunnel systems, without disturbing what is recognized as a grave site by the Jewish community. Using several different geophysical and aerial imagery techniques including electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), induced polarization (IP) and multispectral imaging as well as archival street plans, several areas of interest were identified including possible void spaces and void spaces containing metal objects. This abstract will discuss the results from one of the eight sites involved with this Geoscientists Without Borders (GWB) project. The full project report is available on the GWB website.