German WWII soldiers get proper burial after 60 years

Kyt · Jan 7, 2008

German WWII soldiers get proper burial after 60 years - World - theage.com.au

A MILLION fallen German soldiers are being reburied more than 60 years after the fall of the Third Reich. And, more controversially, the skeletal remains of thousands of Waffen SS Nazis recruited from other European countries are also being reburied.

The operation is taking place across Eastern Europe, where more than 15 million civilians were killed by the German war machine. Resentment against the reburial program is running high in many countries.

So far 520,000 skeletons have been exhumed from mass graves, old trenches and unmarked battlefield graveyards and reburied in properly maintained German war cemeteries. A further 400,000 are due to be exhumed over the next eight years. At least 100,000 will be reburied after that.

German exhumation teams are recovering skeletons from World War II's largest single mechanised engagement: the Battle of Kursk in the Soviet Union, in which thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers died. Kursk's first official German war cemetery is due to open in 2009. Mass exhumation operations are also taking place at other key battle sites, including Stalingrad (now Volgograd).

But the reburial project has been dogged by controversy and distrust. In Poland, authorities systematically check the metal name tag of every reburied German soldier to ensure that the names of war criminals do not appear on German war memorials.

In Belarus and the Czech Republic there is still no agreement covering German military reburials. Indeed in Belarus, where 25% of the population died in World War II, only 2000 of 150,000 German war dead have so far being reburied.

It took six years of negotiations in southern Russia to allay fears that a cemetery might glorify German soldiers. Finally, permission was granted to build a military cemetery in Krasnodar, in the Caucasus, which will open soon.

Elsewhere in Russia, controversy has surrounded the reburial of several hundred Dutch Waffen SS men. It is believed the Dutch Government refused to help trace relatives, saying all Dutchmen who defected to the Nazis had automatically forfeited their Dutch citizenship and were therefore a German responsibility.

The fate of Russian collaborators who fought on the German side in the war is also controversial. It has been impossible to inform their relatives and descendants because the Russian authorities will not acknowledge there was such a thing as Russia collaboration.
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gumalangi · Mar 14, 2008

this is quite ironic, as the memorial at Karlstein in Bad Reichenhall. During the third week of October 2007, without any prior notice or discussion, the local authorities removed all trace of the memorial where the French Waffen-SS soldiers were shot without trial and initially buried.

Antipodean Andy · Mar 14, 2008

Sure it's ugly history but you can't just sweep it under the carpet like that.

Kyt · May 29, 2008

German War Dead to Be Reburied in Czech Graves | Europe | Deutsche Welle | 27.05.2008

Germany's war graves authority has signed an agreement for the remains of some 4,000 German soldiers killed in former Czechoslovakia during World War II to be buried at a special site in the western Czech town of Cheb.

The head of the German war graves authority, Reinhard Fuehrer, and the mayor of Cheb, Jan Svoboda, agreed on Monday, May 26, to build a military cemetery for the German war dead next to the town graveyard.

The agreement was hailed by both sides as an act of reconciliation.

Fuehrer's organization has said it will provide one million euros ($1.6 million) for renovations to the town cemetery, in addition to financing the neighboring portion for the German soldiers.

"Work on the graveyard for the remains of around 4,000 German soldiers will start this year, but most of the work will be carried out next year," town spokesman, Tomas Ivanic, told AFP news agency.

Remains discovered last year

The soldiers' remains have been held at a military training base since they were uncovered by Czech media in March 2006 at a vacant factory in the northern city of Usti Nad Labem. Czech President Vaclav Klaus ordered that the remains be temporarily stored at the base until a permanent solution could be found.

Critics of the decision to transfer the bodies to Cheb expressed concern that the town would become a pilgrimage site for German and Czech neo-Nazis.

The remains of the soldiers to be reburied there were discovered at various locations in the Czech Republic, including some mass graves, the German war graves authority has said.

Soldiers fell in final days

An estimated 178,000 German soldiers died during World War II in former Czechoslovakia fighting Soviet forces from the north and east and US forces from the West.

Fighting in former Czechoslovakia remained heavy in the final weeks of the war as Hitler carried out his futile "final victory" strategy, sending thousands of German troops to their deaths although the outcome of the war had already been decided. Prague was the last major city to be liberated by the Allies.

Other German soldiers who fell in Czechoslovakia have already been buried in the existing 10 military cemeteries around the country.
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Pathfinder · May 29, 2008

Well, it's nice to see that they are getting a proper burial after all these years.

Kyt · Jun 8, 2008

German war dead no one wants to remember - Times Online

It has been a long, troubled journey for the brittle bones and skull of Obergefreiter Horst F, from the dusty frontline ditch where he was killed in 1945, via a Czech lavatory fittings factory to a military warehouse. Soon, though, he and more than 4,000 German soldiers will be laid to rest: Europe’s forgotten warriors, the corpses that no one wants to bury.

If the the luck of the German lance corporal holds, he will have not only a priest but also a civil servant at his graveside; and if the German War Graves Commission can trace the family in time, there may even be a distant relative. But one thing is for sure: it will not be the funeral of a war hero. More likely, the president of the war graves commission, Reinhard Fuehrer, will say similar words to those he used a few years back when he buried a thousand German Wehrmacht corpses in Krasnodar, southern Russia: “We are here today to represent the German people that has learnt its lesson from history and is now looking to the future.”

Unfinished business: that is the only way to describe the tens of thousands of German corpses rotting in distant fields of Eastern Europe. There are conflicting estimates over the number of German military war dead. German historian Wolfram Wette calculates that about 5.3 million German soldiers lost their lives in the Second World War.” Out of that number about 2.6 million were killed in the last phase between July 1944 and May 1945.” The Red Army was moving up fast from the east, rushing for Berlin, eager to establish a military presence in a huge swathe of Eastern Europe.

There was no time for the Germans to bury the dead as one defensive line after another crumbled. And after the war there was no great incentive to dig holes or to carve crosses for the remnants of an army that had been part of Hitler’s oppressive machine. So their coal-scuttle helmets, mangled weapons and badges were plundered by local teenagers and they were left to decay in woods, under bracken or crunched up by digger trucks as they moved in to build high rise blocks for the new communist societies.

“We are very relieved that agreement has been reached,” says Fritz Kirchmeier, of the war graves commission. The small Czech town of Cheb – custard-coloured Habsburgian buildings fringed by brothels and clip joints for cross-border German tourists – has agreed to expand its graveyard to take in the 4,300 bodies that have been on tour for the past 63 years. “We can give names to 1,350 of them,” says Mr Kirchmeier, “and a decent resting place.” Many German civilians must have been among the dead, killed by vengeful Czechs as they tried to flee westwards away from the Russians. At least 200 of the powdery skeletons were dug out of a mass grave hidden underneath the sports field of the Czech town of Rovensko; immediately after the war the local authorities had set up an internment camp for Sudeten Germans there.

So, no, this is not a heroic moment, not even a historic reckoning. The bodies started to be exhumed about ten years ago – the collapse of communism made it possible; so did the need of local authorities for an influx of Western cash. Cheb will receive several hundred thousand euros to enlarge its graveyard and build an approach road to the church. The original plan of the Germans was to bury their dead in a German evangelical church in Prague but that proved too expensive. The church is listed and millions of euros would have had to flow to make it acceptable for the bureaucracy. The fact is Prague was not keen to take on four thousand dead Germans, especially as some of the dead could have been members of the Waffen SS.

Sealed unceremonoiusly in black body bags, the remains of the Germans were then deposited in a cheerless factory specialising in lavatory bowls and bathroom fittings in Usti nad Labem, the Czech end of the Elbe river. There was no lock on the door – and no telling whether any of the bags were removed by looting locals. Eventually, the Germans got wind of the dismal setting and pressed the Czechs to act. The Czech Army – now a Nato partner – poured the remains into more dignified cardboard coffins, held together by staples, and transferred them to a military barracks where they are at least kept under guard.

“It may take a little time to complete the landscaping of the new cemetery but it is a realistic aim to have everyone buried by the end of the year,” says Mr Kirchmeier.

Across Eastern Europe there are German bodies held in a similar state of limbo. The battle for Berlin, from mid-April to surrender at the beginning of May 1945, claimed more than 400,000 German soldiers. Only a small fraction of them were buried properly. The Germans blame the communist authorities, in East Germany, Poland and elsewhere, who officially venerated the heroic Soviet war dead with massive concrete monuments, but who were not bothered by the fate of those who fought on the losing side.

But at least part of the blame rests with the Germans themselves who have been ashamed for the best part of half a century about the ordinary German soldier, unsure whether he was a hero or a criminal. “In the records of the Wehrmacht the average Joe tends to exist only in anonymous form, a statistic,” says Dr Wette, "the logs of military units generally make no mention of enlisted men by name and the same applies to regimental histories written after the war.” Barely 1 per cent of the holdings of the German military archives in Freiburg deals with enlisted soldiers.

Little wonder that they have been ignored in death - they had already been airbrushed out of history by the Germans themselves. There is no equivalent to the tomb of the unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris or the Cenotaph in London. Instead, villages put up small monuments to those who died “in war and dictatorship, 1914-45” and sometimes the names of locals are etched into the side. But more often than not families do not know where their relatives died or where they now lie.

Thanks to the lobbying work and fundraising of the German War Graves Commission there are now 20 German military cemeteries in Russia, still too few to accomodate the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died in epic encounters like the Siege of Leningrad. Search teams still go out during the summer. German soldiers, on active service or in reserve units, travel to Russia and elsewhere to help.

Archaeology is about the search for lost civilisations. The search for German remains is something else: an attempt to recover the memory of how savage war can be and then put the memory to rest.

Military casualties

Army estimated 13,600,000 served; estimated 4,202,000 killed

Air force estimated 2,500,000 served; estimated 433,000 killed

Navy estimated 1,200,000 served; estimated 138,000 killed

Waffen SS estimated 900,000 served; estimated 314,000 killed

1,419,728 estimated number of German troops killed or wounded on the Eastern Front
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Antipodean Andy · Jun 8, 2008

Phenomenal numbers. Sure there's probably some not very nice people being buried with some honour. Not all Germans were Nazis despite what the press makes it look like.

mathsmal · Jun 9, 2008

I think one of the comments on the Times site queried the last number and said it was out by a few million:

1,419,728 estimated number of German troops killed or wounded on the Eastern Front

There was a good article in After the Battle a few years ago about the work recording and recovering German graves in the ex-USSR.

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