80 years after WWII, Germany is still painstakingly searching for its fallen soldiers
In a forest near Berlin, the remains of 107 fallen Wehrmacht soldiers were ceremoniously interred last week. High school students placed white gerbera daisies on small black coffins, and German soldiers lowered them respectfully into a large, freshly dug grave as a military band played a solemn tune.
Hundreds of villagers and relatives of the fallen watched silently, some wiping tears off their cheeks, as the soldiers who died in one of the last large World War II battles fighting for Adolf Hitler's army got their final resting place.
The gestures of remembrance are part of a long, complicated — and sometimes controversial — effort to bring the German dead to rest, 80 years after a war that Nazi Germany started.
It's still not the end — much work remains to identify the dead and notify any surviving family members.
Across Europe, in forests, fields and beneath old farmland, the remains of German soldiers are still being found, exhumed and reburied by teams from a nonprofit organization called the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, or German War Graves Commission, which has been doing this work for decades.
A search for the dead
As the world pauses this week to mark the 80th anniversary of the war's end, the continued search for soldiers' remains is a reminder that the conflict's legacy is not only historical or political, but also physical and unfinished, still unfolding across Europe.
"It's very, very important that this is still being done," said Martina Seiger, 57, whose grandfather's bones were found and buried a few years ago.
Seiger and her family make a point of attending the burials of other soldiers who died in the battle of Halbe in 1945. It's as close as they can get to some kind of funeral for her grandfather, Werner Novak.
Novak was 21 when he was killed. He had already been injured and sent back from the front to Berlin. He was planning to marry his pregnant fiancée and hoped for a more peaceful future, Seiger said.
Instead, as the Soviet's Red Army was approaching Berlin in the last weeks of war, he was back into battle.
Lost in the chaos of war
The process of finding and identifying the remains is slow — many of the missing were buried hastily during retreat or combat, with no markers or records. Some sites are remembered only vaguely, passed down through local knowledge.
Others are beyond reach, beneath modern infrastructure or the front line in eastern Ukraine.
Still, the Volksbund works on, searching across Europe's old battlefields, following tips, checking old military maps and missing soldiers lists. The work continues even in western Ukraine, away from the raging fighting in the country's east.
When possible, the organization brings the remains to cemeteries maintained specifically for German soldiers who died abroad. It says its goal is humanistic: to offer a dignified burial to every person who died in the war, regardless of the role they played. That includes soldiers who served in a military responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
The Volksbund does not frame its mission as one of honoring the fallen, but of identifying them and ensuring they are not left to vanish into the earth, without a name.
A missing father
Wolfgang Bartsch, 83, stood on a small hill near the open graves as the soldiers' bones were laid to rest.
Bartsch has never been able to bury his own father, who died in January 1942 fighting on the front in Russia. He was just three weeks old. Days earlier his mother was killed in an Allied bomb raid on Berlin. He was raised by his grandmother but always felt the pain of growing up without parents.
"My dad is buried somewhere in a nameless grave in Oryol in Russia," he said. "The Volksbund will never be able to recover his bones because I know that lots of settlements were built on top of those graves."
By the Volksbund's estimate, more than 2 million German soldiers remain unaccounted for. Over the past 30 years, since gaining access to former Eastern Bloc territories, the Volksbund has recovered and reburied the remains of a million people.
Work that can be controversial
In some parts of Europe, resentment lingers toward anything perceived as rehabilitating the Nazi military past. But many accept that efforts to find the dead could help close this chapter of history.
"I don't want to rule out the possibility that we have a large number of war criminals in our war graves. We also know that some of them have even been proven to have committed the most serious war crimes," said Dirk Backen, the secretary general of the Volksbund.
"Behind every dead person is a human destiny and that is our main focus," he said. "When you stand in front of the grave of an 18-year-old young Wehrmacht soldier, you naturally ask yourself whether he may have had other plans in life and a different dream than to give his life at the age of 18 for a cause that was also criminal."
Weeks before the burial in Halbe, an exhumation took place in the Polish city of Ostrołęka, where Volksbund employees and local Polish archaeologists dug for the remains of German soldiers in a Polish cemetery wherever it would not involve disturbing a marked grave.
The skeletons were documented that day, March 19, and the bones of each person were sealed into a black bag. Dog tags were saved in the hope the remains can one day be identified. The group plans to rebury them later this year at a military ceremony in Poland.
They deserve to be buried
Łukasz Karol, a Polish archaeologist working on the exhumation, acknowledges having had ethical concerns as he considered the job of unearthing soldiers of an army that invaded Poland and killed some 6 million Polish citizens over the course of the war.
But he said the work has moral significance and uncovers important scientific information.
"These are also people and they also deserve a burial," Karol said.
Unlike in the immediate postwar years, few families today are actively searching for lost relatives. In many cases, the emotional and generational distance is too great; there is no one left to remember the missing, or the need for closure has faded with time.
For Bartsch, the 83-year-old who attended the burial in Halbe, there is no closure.
"I still can't find peace when I think that so many people are still buried here in the ground without a proper funeral," he said. "My heart would rejoice if only I could bury my father too, but that won't happen."
Source: Associated Press
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