08-05-2025
German burials of Nazi war dead stir controversy over national memory
A meeting for veterans in the small town of Meymac in central France was coming to an end. All items on the agenda had been discussed when 95-year-old Edmond Reveil announced to the group he had a confession to make – a secret he could no longer hold on to.
The former Resistance member explained to attendees how in June 1944, the small group of fighters he was with had captured 47 German soldiers and a French woman suspected of collaborating with the occupying forces. Lacking the means to keep them prisoner and afraid the soldiers would destroy Meymac as they had nearby Tulle just a few days earlier, the group decided to kill their captives.
Their remains, Reveil said, may still be buried on a wooded hill nearby.
Meymac's mayor, who was at the meeting, knew nothing about the drama that had unfolded in his commune until Reveil made his confession back in 2019. Shortly after, he informed both the French National Office for Veterans and Victims of War (ONaCVG) and its German counterpart, the War Graves Commission (Volksbund).
After years spent verifying the veteran's claims, waiting for the Covid-19 pandemic to pass and getting the green light from authorities, the search for the remains began in August, 2023.
A 'dignified' burial
World War II ended 80 years ago but the remains of Germans are still being discovered today.
A Dutch couple unearthed a Nazi helmet while digging for a water pipe on their property in Poland. After an extensive excavation effort led by the Volksbund, the remains of 120 German civilians and eight soldiers were uncovered from the depths of their garden in March 2023.
Ukrainian servicemen found the remains of two Wehrmacht soldiers in the northern outskirts of Kyiv while digging a trench in April 2022. And in early 2023, the Volksbund unearthed the bones of 41 German soldiers in a small town in western Ukraine after a local pastor gave a tip saying a medical plane had crashed near the village during the war.
Whether Nazi soldier or child caught in artillery fire, it is the goal of the Volksbund to look for and recover the bodies of Germans abroad who died in both the first and second World Wars and offer them a 'dignified' burial. On its website, the commission says it is 'committed to the culture of remembrance'.
The Volksbund, founded in 1919, was a citizens' initiative before it was handed it over to the Nazi government and the Wehrmacht graves service. When WWII ended, the Volksbund slowly restructured itself and in 1954, the German government officially commissioned the organisation to take on the role it occupies today.
The commission says it receives more than 20,000 inquiries a year about the whereabouts of Germans who died or went missing during both World Wars.
It claims to be mostly self-funded through donations and 'income from legacies and bequests', with the rest of its costs covered by public funds from the German government.
Countries generally have an organisation similar to the Volksbund, like the ONaCVG in France or the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. But when it comes to Germany, memory is in constant battle with the past, and the Volksbund's activities can be a contentious issue.
Thorny questions
Critics of the Volksbund have argued that in providing proper burials to Wehrmacht soldiers, the commission indirectly puts their lives on equal footing with the victims of WWII. And even the former president of the organisation, Markus Meckel, acknowledged the complex nature of burying the remains of German soldiers in an interview with the New York Times.
'How do we mourn and remember these soldiers without honouring them?' he said.
The Volksbund's activities have also become increasingly muddied with the rise of extremist parties across Europe. For the first time since WWII ended eight decades ago, a far-right party – the AfD – came in second during the German parliamentary elections on February 23, doubling its votes from 2021. The party is a fervent supporter of the Volksbund. Its leader, Alice Weidel, called on the German government in October 2024 to provide more financial support to the organisation.
The left in Germany has criticised the use of public funds for the Volksbund, calling it 'intolerable'. In response, the Volksbund insisted 'war dead have a right to permanent rest'.
'There is a danger that the Volksbund becomes instrumentalised,' says Darren O'Byrne, a historian of modern Germany at Cambridge University. 'Although it existed before the AfD, its interests align with those of the party, who are in favour of a more honourable treatment of Germany's war dead.'
But O'Byrne, who lived in Germany for 12 years, says that the controversies around the organisation are 'not much discussed' in the country and that the work they do is 'quite respected'.
'[The Volksbund] carries out what would be perceived by many as a rather mundane task,' he explains. 'There seems to be a broad political consensus among German parties, broadly speaking, of an appreciation of its work. The AfD is not the only party who wants to provide it with public funding.'
However, the way German history is framed and remembered is also a broader, ongoing discussion in the country, especially in far-right circles. Senior figures of the AfD have called for an end of the country's post-war repentance and dubbed the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a 'memorial of shame'.
'Whether the [Volksbund] exists or not, it will have a very little role in the change in German memory culture,' says O'Byrne. 'That is not to say that it doesn't have a certain responsibility, though.'
'There is [also] a dissonance between the perceptions of the Volksbund from the outside and how it is treated inside Germany,' the historian explains. 'In the Western historical consciousness, places like the US or UK, Nazism is the evil. It is literally north on the moral compass. So it does not come as a surprise that other countries are saying, 'How can you be burying people who not only took part in, but largely drove the greatest human catastrophe in modern history?''
'Does it come down to who deserves a burial?' O'Byrne asks. 'It is a really complex question.'
The grey zones of remembrance
Lucien Tisserand was hired by the Volksbund to be the custodian of Normandy's La Cambe German cemetery from 1991 to 2014. Beyond maintaining the grounds, he was also tasked with exhuming the remains of German soldiers killed during WWII. Tisserand recovered the remains of 200 bodies throughout his career.
'A lot of tips came to us a few decades after the war,' he told daily newspaper Ouest France in May of last year. 'Many people knew [where German soldiers were buried], but said nothing. It was taboo. I remember a farmer who knew bodies were on his plot of land but would make a detour to avoid driving past them.'
Like Reveil, the former Resistance fighter, who waited over seven decades to go public. Once the others in the group who had witnessed the killings with him had all died, he decided it was time – he did not want to take the secret with him to his grave.
'We felt ashamed, but did we have a choice?' Reveil told local newspaper La Vie Correzienne, who first published his testimonial in May 2023.
Once it was in the press, the story spread like wildfire. And in the lead-up to the search for remains that began in August 2023, Reveil's critics said he had smeared the image of the French Resistance by talking about mass killings. He had tarnished the heroic image they had upheld since the end of the war.
'[Reveil] offered history. It seems his critics were interested in memory. They were interested in a version of history that was probably bound up in their identity,' says O'Byrne. 'History and memory clash all the time.'
A search was carried out in Meymac in the 1960s, and 11 of the 47 bodies were excavated. The mission was abruptly stopped after five days, and no one knows why. But the most agreed-upon hypothesis is that the Volksbund was facing intense anger from local memorial associations.
No remains were found following Reveil's confession and the consequent search that took place in August that year. In October 2024, search efforts were given one 'last chance'. The excavation lasted three days before being officially shut down for good.
As time passes, those like Reveil who were alive during World War II and witnessed events first-hand are becoming fewer and farther between. "Once the last victim, perpetrator or bystander dies, the Third Reich will cease to be a living memory. All that will be left is history," says O'Byrne. "Then we, the living, get to negotiate what lessons we take from it."
The historian ends with a cautious eye to the future. 'In this climate, everything is being questioned again … We are finding ourselves at an inflection point in history where everything is being renegotiated.'
