Five human skeletons with their hands and feet missing have been dug up in the ruins of a Nazi HQ that was home to war criminal Hermann Göring.
The remains, which include those of a newborn, were found during a dig inside the ruins of the Wolf’s Lair, which had been Adolf Hitler’s eastern command headquarters in Poland, according to archeologists with the Latebra Foundation.
The historical group first found a fragment of a skull on Feb. 24, then later unearthed the bodies of three adults, one teenager and the baby, all thought to be members of the same family.
“We didn’t expect something like that,” historian Oktavian Bartoszewsk said in a YouTube video documenting the dig.
“The discovery shocked us and probably scarred us for life.”
He said it was “crazy to find something like this after so long” given that “masses of treasure hunters have scoured the site over the decades.”
“A find like this gives you goosebumps, it’s not nice,” he said, according to the Times of London.
The five bodies were located near each other outside Göring’s residence at the Wolf’s Lair, with the skeletons all facing the same direction.
There were no traces of clothing on the bodies, nor was it immediately clear what happened to the missing body parts.
“There are many theories [about] why they do not have hands and feet,” Adrian Kostrzewa, a member of the Latebra Foundation, told CNN. “Right now, it’s very hard to say.”
Polish authorities have been alerted to the findings and are conducting an investigation.
Along with the mystery over the condition of the bodies, it’s still unknown as to whether they were victims inside the Nazi camp or buried there years afterwards.
Göring, the highest-ranking Nazi officer to be tried at Nuremberg, resided at the Wolf’s Lair, which served as the German military’s Easter Front headquarters.
Adolf Hitler also spent years at the Nazi base, which was famously the site of Operation Valkyrie, a failed assassination attempt by German military leaders to overthrow Hitler and the Third Reich.
The base itself was ultimately destroyed by the fleeing Nazis as the Soviet’s advanced in 1945, according to the Latebra Foundation.
Göring, who was convicted for his crimes against humanity, would go on to kill himself with a cyanide pill in 1946 on the eve of his hanging.