One of the first and only attempts at criminal prosecutions for wartime environmental destruction dates from the period of the Second World War when Poland listed 11 Germans as war criminals for the destruction of Polish forests. This is the untold story of a legal case filed by Poland against Germany in 1947 as part of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), where Polish prosecutors laid out a novel case against foresters and high-ranking officers of the General Government for the occupied Polish region. The obscure case, no. 1307 often turns up in legal essays on the protection of the natural environment – an idea which is gaining traction with recent efforts to recognize ecocide as a fifth international crime.

‘Race and Forest’, INTERPRT’s exhibition – commissioned by Biennale Warszawa – for the first time reconstructs case no. 1307 and looks at how forests were used to hide the evidence of mass murder in Chelmno – Nazi Germany’s first extermination camp – using original documents, photographs, diagrams, drawings, and text drawn from the archives of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Polish National Archives with visual and cartographic evidence and digital 3-D representations.