Former shaft of the Reden mine in Radlin, where in 1939-1945 the occupiers murdered local residents; a monument stands on the site.
The Reden shaft in Radlin was used for extraction and ventilation of the mine, and during the Second World War it became the site of a crime: the occupiers threw captured residents of the area into the disused shaft. Today a monument commemorating the victims stands on the site of the former shaft.
The shaft lay near the former village of Biertułtowy, today the part of Radlin called Reden. It belonged to the Reden hard coal mine, which operated from 1842, and was in use from 1892 to March 1905. Originally it was 204.5 m deep. After the mine was closed it was converted into a ventilation shaft for the nearby Emma mine (today Marcel) and deepened to about 300 m. Later it was closed again, and after its final shutdown it was flooded to a depth of 70 m.
In 1939-1945 people from the surrounding area of the Rybnik-Wodzisław land were thrown alive into the disused shaft. After the Red Army entered Radlin in March 1945, a commission was appointed to investigate the matter, and a miner was lowered into the shaft, who saw the bodies of victims at the bottom. The bodies of eight people were recovered, two men and six women, of whom five were identified. The final number of victims is not known, because some of the bodies sank to the bottom. The victims were buried in the parish cemetery in Radlin-Biertułtowy, where a gravestone with an inscription honouring the “fallen heroes, thrown alive into the Reden shaft” was replaced in the mid-1990s with a new one in the form of a cross.
In 1973 a monument commemorating the crime was erected on the site of the former shaft through voluntary community work; it stands there to this day. In 2024 the Jordanowski Park was created on the site of the former Reden mine shafts.
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