German WWII soldiers get proper burial after 60 years
An exhumation site near Volgograd.
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.