January 24, 1944---some seventy censored letters home and 458 days after he was imprisoned in Stalag Luft III, Ewart Sconiers was dead.  Though his remains likely have been found, he  is the only American from Stalag Luft III to not yet be returned home.  Time also marches on for those who wait.

LT. SCONIERS, THIRD FROM LEFT, WITH SOME OF THE DIXIE DEMO CREW                               UPON RETURN FROM THEIR THIRD MISSION--                               WHICH WAS TO AMIENS, FRANCE, AUGUST 20, 1942

Albert P. Clark was the young Lt. Colonel at the camp to whom Sconiers reported.  Clark was in charge of security for tunneling for the great escape. In his book, 33 Months as a POW in Stalag Luft III, Clark gave his account of Sconiers’ (“Ed,” he called him) last days and burial.  Sconiers’ Individual Deceased Personnel File contains other details.

Shortly before New Year’s Day of 1944, Sconiers slipped on the ice, fell, and suffered a ruptured ear drum and related infection that, it is now believed, led to either meningitis or encephalitis, either of which likely penetrated his brain.  Robert B. Hermann wrote on Sconiers’ Casualty Interrogation Form as the cause of death, “Fell on ice in prison camp and broke ear drum and subsequently went somewhat out of his mind.  Was said by prison official to have died on way to hospital, which statement the undersigned has considerable cause to doubt.”  Hermann went on to report that the actual death was witnessed only by prison officials but the accident that supposedly lead to death was witnessed by Capt. Heston C. Daniels, the camp Medical Officer.  To date, neither Daniels’ history nor German medical records are available to document this account.

It is indisputable that complications resulting from the injury began to affect Sconiers’ mental state.  Senior Allied officers at the camp persuaded the camp commandant to admit Sconiers to the camp hospital, as his mental stability was deteriorating to the extent he appeared schizophrenic and often hid under his bed fearing the Germans were about to take him away.  Indeed, they did.

On January 9, 1944, the commandant transferred Sconiers to the Reserve Hospital in Luben, Germany (now Lubin, Poland).  Germans reported that Sconiers died in the hospital on January 24, 1944.  He was buried at approximately 11:00 a.m. on January 27 by Clark and a detachment of his fellow Stalag Luft III POWs in what was reported by Germans as grave number 7 of the POW section of the municipal cemetery in what is now Lubin, Poland. One comrade attending the burial, Sconiers’ pilot Milton Stenstrom, later wrote in a report that Sconiers was buried along what was then the very boundary or outer edge of the cemetery and that “the grave was not marked at the time of burial, but I presume it will be marked with a small white cross as the adjacent graves were marked.”

In April 1948, the American Graves Registration Service (AGRS) conducted a field investigation in Lubin, Poland , but attempts to locate Sconiers’ burial site were unsuccessful.  The AGRS team found no remaining records of any American deaths or burials in Lubin.  The team then visited the municipal cemetery and was shown the POW section, which was a long single row of individual graves without identif'ying markers.  The AGRS team exhumed the seventh grave from each end and the seventh grave in each direction from the center.  The team declared that, after close inspection, none of the bodies was identifiable as American.  This investigation was later deemed unsatisfactory by the AGRS chain of command.  Due to political circumstances at that time, however, U.S. teams were not allowed access to Lubin for a second search.  Sconiers’ remains were subsequently declared unrecoverable, and the American Battle Monuments Commission and Roster of the Dead still list him as missing.

In the late 1960s, however, four photos purportedly of Sconiers’ burial were sent to his family.  Prior to that, other than the Western Union telegrams regarding Sconiers’ death, the family had no details as to his burial and no options regarding disposition of remains.  Repeated family inquiries from 1951 through 1998 confirmed inaccessibility, and on October 15, 1955, Sconiers’ official status was classified as “unrecoverable.” 

A mid-60s family attempt to personally gain entry to the general vicinity of the camp was prevented by Russian occupation.  The source of the four purported photos of Sconiers’ burial is unknown by remaining family members, but all recall Sconiers’ siblings’ certainty upon receipt of them.  The photos showed a very proper military burial ceremony.  Not only was the formality of the burial scene incongruous with what family members imagined likely for a POW, the long wool coats of the men standing graveside and the faint Swastikas on burial wreath ribbons compelled Sconiers’ family to believe that the photos were contrived by Germans and offered to the U.S. government to appease grieving family members.  Sconiers’ mother, father, and sister died absolutely convinced he had been shot (perhaps trying to escape) and was thrown in a mass grave, never to be found. 

Nothing could have been farther from the truth, a truth never revealed to those who loved him most.

The embodiment of America ’s promise to her soldiers, Chief Petty Officer John Gray discovered the truth.  Gray, lead researcher for Sconiers’ case within the former Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) of the Joint Commission Support Directorate’s (JCSD) World War II Working Group (WWIIWG) traveled to Poland in September 2006.  In Sagan, Gray met with the Stalag Luft III/Stalag VIII-C museum director Jacek Jakubiak and reviewed the museum’s collection of documents and artifacts from the two camps.  One of the museum’s books, Clipped Wings, by R. W. Kimball, is dedicated to four American soldiers, one of whom is Sconiers.  Though the book does not identify where the photographs were taken, it does contain photographs of four burials, one of which is Sconiers’.  Since Gen. Clark stands graveside in the photos, Gray contacted him, and Clark authenticated them—the same photos the family was certain were contrived!  Jakubiak explained to Gray that it had been difficult to find any area witnesses familiar with the Stalag Luft III camp and its activities, since Sagan had originally been a German town, and the Soviets forced German residents out of the area in the post-war period.  Gray and his team traveled to Lubin in an attempt to locate the cemetery indicated in U. S. records as Sconiers’ burial site. 

Four different cemeteries existed in the area, but it was a comrade’s act of remembrance that ultimately may serve to lead Sconiers home. 

The main municipal cemetery in Lubin contains a small plot dedicated to Soviet soldiers who died during WWII, but cemetery officials had no knowledge of any American servicemen interred there.  The oldest gravestones in the cemetery dated only to the mid-1950s.  There was no section of the cemetery that matched the description provided by Sconiers’ pilot, Milton Stenstrom, also pictured graveside.  The second cemetery, located approximately five miles southwest of the municipal cemetery, is more modern and contains headstones dating from the 1990s.  Two  other smaller cemeteries, located to the south and southwest of Lubin, could not be located in the time available.  More research was needed.

During an interview with JCSD analysts in November 2006, Clark was able to provide a hand-drawn sketch of the cemetery where Sconiers was buried.  However, he could neither provide the location of the cemetery nor the directional orientation of Sconiers’ grave.  

Location began to fall into place in December 2006 when JCSD learned from Ms. Dorota Pazio, a researcher at the KARTA Center , that a current park in Lubin was at one time used as a cemetery.  The park, currently located near railroad tracks, correlated with those in Clark ’s sketch.  JCSD obtained 1944 aerial photography of Lubin, which helped locate the former cemetery indicated by KARTA as it existed during WWII.  Close examination of this imagery revealed individual headstones at the current location of the park, further lending credence to the notion that it was a cemetery at the time of Sconiers’ death.

It was time for a field investigation of the cemetery/park.  Thus, in March 2007, JCSD analysts again visited Lubin.  The team met with Mr. Stanislaw Tokarczuk, a local college professor and town historian.  Tokarczuk confirmed KARTA’s information that the current municipal park was a cemetery during WWII.  He also informed the team that after the war, the current municipal park area became part of a restricted zone controlled by the Soviet Army.  The Soviets did not do any construction at the park, and it was left undisturbed.  Later, the Soviets handed back control of the park to the Poles, who also left the area undisturbed.  Tokarczuk showed the team the old German barracks where Clark claimed the burial detail picked up Sconiers’ casket and marched to the cemetery.  The team determined that it was approximately 300-400 yards from the barracks to the park cemetery.  The team took extensive photographs and GPS coordinates of the park outline.  However, at the time, the team could not correlate Clark’s sketch to Tokarczuk’s information on the location of the front gate; thus, they could not use Clark ’s drawing to pinpoint the location of the grave. 

No one but Destiny could anticipate a Catalpa would lead Sconiers home.  In August 2007, the JCSD-contracted KARTA center informed DPMO that the internet site www.lubin.pl. carried a news article stating that a Lubin resident, Ms. Stefania Saracen, knew the exact location of Sconiers’ grave.  Saracen has lived in Lubin since 1953 and obtained her information second-hand from Mr. Walter Kierschner, a retired teacher who lived directly across the street from the cemetery.  One day, while walking near the cemetery, Saracen asked Kierschner about an American Catalpa tree that caught her attention.  Kierschner stated that a friend of an American airman planted the tree next to the airman’s grave.  According to the story, the grave is located 15 meters from a monument dedicated to Sconiers in March 2007.  Gray and other investigators happened to be present for the dedication of the monument, which is located on the southeastern side of the park.  However, DPMO received the information about the tree after their visit to Lubin and were unable to inspect the site.  Further JCSD inquiries to KARTA revealed that Tokarczuk knew Kierschner personally.  Tokarczuk stated that Kierschner’s information was probably correct.  Kierschner left Lubin in the 1950s and is now deceased.  At DPMO’s request and during its October 2007 investigation in Poland , the former Joint Personnel Accounting Command (JPAC) interviewed Saracen, who pointed out what she believed to be the exact location of the grave.  According to U. S. records, Sconiers is the only American service member who is known to be buried in Lubin, Poland

As of January 31, 2008, Sconiers' case was on JPAC’s list for excavation, ranked as priority 5, “known loss with probable remains.”  JPAC approved warranted requests to raise the priority of Sconiers’ case and expedite excavation, and their first recovery mission, though unsuccessful, was conducted in October 2011. See website pages devoted to this attempt.