Maria Trzcińska

Maria (Marianna) Trzcińska (22 March 1931 – 22 December 2011 in Warsaw) was a Polish judge employed for over 30 years in the People's Republic of Poland at the Chief Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland (Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce). She investigated and researched German World War II crimes in Poland.

Trzcińska was the author of a controversial monograph about the Warsaw concentration camp (KL Warschau) set up by the SS in occupied Poland. The book, published in the 1990s, presented a fringe theory which a decade later was definitively rejected by historians. Until 2007, however, her book was the only monograph dedicated to the camp. She also argued that the number of victims in the camp was 200,000, about ten times greater than accepted by mainstream historians. Her additional claims made on behalf of a public-monument committee, which unsuccessfully attempted to raise support for a monument dedicated to the alleged much greater size of the German camp extending beyond Warszawa Zachodnia station, a theory Trzcińska promoted in several monographs as well, but that was also refuted by the IPN and other mainstream historians, who consider her fringe theory, based on a single interview, not substantiated enough.