‘Burying the Enemy' Review: Death Behind the Lines
Eduard Becker was a German airman shot down over Scotland in July 1941. After their bodies were recovered, he and his crew were given proper burials in a local cemetery. In 1954 Becker's mother, Agathe, finally arrived to pick up her son's remains. Upon discovering Becker's grave 'so well cared for and beautifully set out,' Agathe opted to leave him where he was, 'reassured by the idea that her son's presence . . . was helping to heal everything that 'the war had destroyed.''
Somewhere around 80 million people were killed during World War II, about half of them combatants. We know (mostly) what happened to those who perished on the battlefield, but what of those who died in enemy territory or in captivity?
As Tim Grady, a professor of modern European history at the University of Chester, writes in 'Burying the Enemy,' Becker was among the approximately 4,500 Germans who died on British soil during World War II. For the most part these soldiers, sailors and airmen were treated with dignity, put into graves in the town cemetery and tended to with care. After all, Mr. Grady reminds us, there would have been local boys, perhaps shot down on similar bombing runs over Germany, who suffered the same fate.
As the Allied bombing campaign intensified over Nazi Germany, the German civilians became less and less sympathetic to the crewmen who landed in their gardens. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propogandist, exploited these feelings, saying it would be understandable if the 'child murderers' were 'beaten to death by a beleaguered public.' And they sometimes were.
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