Latest news with #GermanWarGravesCommission
Associated Press
5 days ago
- General
- Associated Press
Volksbund opens exhibition in Marigny and inaugurates memorial with the Würth Foundation
Today the German War Graves Commission will expand the Marigny war cemetery into a memorial and learning center – one day before the 81st anniversary of D-Day, which marks the beginning of the liberation of Europe by the Western Allies. A permanent multimedia exhibition provides information about the biographies of the soldiers buried there and shows the history of the Western Allies' landing ('Operation Overlord'). This exhibition combines modern media stations with historical architecture. With the support of the non-profit Würth Foundation, a memorial approximately 3.5 meters tall was designed and constructed, which will be inaugurated today. It honors the US soldiers who fought alongside their allies for the liberation of Europe. A compass rose points to the four cardinal directions from which the Allied forces pushed back the Nazi dictatorship. For Carmen Würth, who founded the Würth Foundation in 1987 together with her husband Prof. Dr. h. c. mult. Reinhold Würth, the memorial is a tribute to those who liberated Europe and, at the same time, a call to everyone to preserve humanity and peace. In front of the memorial, a trilingual plaque commemorates First Lieutenant Nathan B. Baskind and all other US soldiers. The American soldier, who was Jewish, was buried in a German comrades' grave in Marigny in 1944. In 2023, he was exhumed, identified, and solemnly reburied the following year at the American military cemetery in Colleville under a Jewish gravestone. This was carried out by the Volksbund in cooperation with 'Operation Benjamin' from New York. The Volksbund was founded in 1919 to search for the dead of World War I and inform their relatives. It maintains more than 2.8 million war graves worldwide. Even today, the humanitarian organization continues to clarify the fates of war dead. For more than 70 years, it has been committed to a more peaceful future through international youth work and numerous educational projects. The private association finances its work primarily by donations.
06-05-2025
- General
80 years after World War II, Germany is still searching for its fallen soldiers
HALBE, Germany -- 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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."
The Independent
06-05-2025
- General
- The Independent
80 years after World War II, 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 is a reminder that the conflict's legacy is not only historical or political, it is also physical and unfinished, still unfolding in the ground beneath Europe's surface. '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." ___ Gera reported from Ostrołęka, Poland.
Washington Post
06-05-2025
- General
- Washington Post
80 years after World War II, Germany is still painstakingly searching for its fallen soldiers
HALBE, Germany — 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. As the world pauses this week to mark the 80th anniversary of the war's end , the continued search is a reminder that the conflict's legacy is not only historical or political, it is also physical and unfinished, still unfolding in the ground beneath Europe's surface . '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. 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. 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. 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. 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.' ___ Gera reported from Ostrołęka, Poland.
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘A common humanity': the British families who tended graves of German soldiers
For some, tending the graves was an act of reconciliation. For others, it was about acknowledging shared losses and shared grief. Thousands of Germans who died in Britain during the first and second world wars were laid to rest in local graveyards. British people tended these graves for decades, even laying flowers and wreaths for their former foes. A historian has uncovered new details of this extraordinary relationship, and found that more than 7,000 German soldiers and prisoners of war were once buried in cemeteries near the British towns and villages where they died. Tim Grady, professor of modern history at the University of Chester, unearthed a previously overlooked pile of documents 'wrapped in brown paper' in the German War Graves Commission (VDK) archives, which turned out to be interwar records about the graves from the German embassy in London that no scholar had ever consulted. After the wars, Grady said, there were so many dead soldiers scattered across the globe that people felt that tending to the war graves in their local area was a 'tangible' way of overcoming the 'horrors of war'. 'If you can do something for the war dead who are close to you, perhaps other people will do the same for your loved ones, wherever they are buried,' he said. The policy of the Imperial War Graves Commission was to leave the bodies of British soldiers in the country where they had died, too, meaning thousands were buried in military cemeteries abroad rather than repatriated. Grady discovered that one British couple who lost their son in the first world war tended the grave of a German fighter whose plane came down near their home. 'They've got this shared experience of loss that they feel is bonding them together with the other bereaved family,' he said. Most of the time, however, it wasn't a straightforward reciprocal arrangement, he said. 'It was based on a kind of common humanity, coming out of the wars, where I think people wanted to try to build a better future and they saw caring for the enemy dead was a way to do this.' In Bishop's Stortford, Herts, one family made it 'almost their life's mission' to look after the graves of 15 German war dead buried there. 'They spent all their money tending these graves – they say they do it to comfort the mothers back in Germany, and as a basis for reconciliation.' There are even examples of people laying wreaths on German graves on Remembrance Day 'because they want to unite them' with British graves, Grady said. Others left flowers or took photos of the graves for bereaved family members back in Germany, inviting them to visit. Some people also responded to letters German families wrote to local councils in the UK, asking for information after learning a loved one had died nearby. 'And so you start to get genuine human contact between the two sides – and that breaks down barriers between the British and the Germans after both wars. That's the initial basis for some form of reconciliation between the two populations that were enemies.' Between 1962 and 1963 the German government systematically exhumed almost all the bodies of their war dead from graves across the UK and reburied them in a single military cemetery on Cannock Chase, Staffordshire. But its efforts were met with unexpected resistance from British people who had, in some cases, been tending the graves for almost 50 years. 'In one cemetery in Yorkshire, a local councillor saw the German team coming to exhume a couple of these German graves and he threatened to call the police,' said Grady, whose book, Burying the Enemy: The Story of Those Who Cared for the Dead in Two World Wars, was published last week. 'He said: 'You can't take them. These are our Germans. We've been looking after them.' And he tried to stop them. But the exhumation team had papers from the Home Office that say they're allowed to do this. They can't be stopped.' The graves of the German war dead in Britain played a crucial role in restoring relations between the countries after the world wars, Grady said. One RAF commander filled 12 wooden urns with soil from German graves near his base in Sussex, and sent the urns to the bereaved German families of those who were buried there. 'One of them was an unknown pilot, so they couldn't trace his family. The VDK has still got that urn sitting in its archive.' In Poole, Dorset, a British man who lived opposite a cemetery bumped into the widow of a Nazi bomber who had been shot down and buried there. 'She was visiting her husband's grave after the war.' After meeting at the graveside, they stayed in contact, exchanging Christmas cards and letters. 'He tends the grave, laying flowers there and writing to her about how the grave is. He even ends up going over to Germany on holiday, and stays with her and her new husband.' In Montrose, Scotland, 'lots of local people' welcomed the mother of a Nazi killed nearby in a plane crash, when she visited her son's grave in the early 1950s. 'Somebody wanted to drive her to the cemetery, somebody wanted to find her a hotel, someone else wanted to take her out for dinner. All to show her: we're no longer enemies, we understand your loss, let's work together.' Such connections were important for Anglo-German relations, Grady said, as they involved ordinary people and their communities. 'Because the enemy bodies were buried locally, it forced people locally to recognise that the other side also experienced loss.'
