Seven decades after second World War, Germany is still burying its dead

The 123 miniature coffins, black boxes with numbers chalked on to their fronts, are resting beside a massive grave cut into Brandenburg’s soft, sandy soil. Before a large cross fashioned from two birch trunks, two red-bereted young soldiers from Germany’s postwar army, the Bundeswehr, stand guard.

Seven decades after the second World War ended in Berlin, Germany is still burying its dead. And here in the military graveyard in Halbe, an hour southeast of Berlin, hundreds of people have turned out to pay their respects to the latest soldiers to join the 27,000 already lying here.

Most lost their lives here in Halbe in April 1945 in one of the last, vicious battles of the war. Among the graveside crowd is the bright-eyed 94-year-old Heinz Rothe. He was called up to the Wehrmacht as a 19 year old in 1939 and served in the 6th company of the 457th infantry division, known colloquially as the “Berlin Bears”, until he was captured in Romania in 1944.

Rothe watches soldiers as young as he once was lower the small coffins into the grave, thinking about the 180 young men of his own company who once marched to war, and the 30 who returned. “I remember rushing forward in battle and noticing my comrades dropping away, one by one,” he says. “We had no time to go back for them, to give them a decent burial, so being here today brings me some peace.”

Terrified locals

The Halbe graveyard is a peaceful and dignified place but seven decades ago, as local pastor Jürgen Behnken recalls, it was once anything but. As the Wehrmacht and

Red Army

clashed, terrified locals and deserters hid among the trees and the dead bodies, begging for the war to end.

Organising the burial is Germany's Volksbund – the war graves commission. To date the Volksbund has helped find and bury 25,000 soldiers' remains: in forests, fields, building sites in Germany and around Europe. The end of the cold war a quarter century ago has opened up the former battlefields of central and eastern Europe.

Sometimes the Volksbund teams can identify remains via soldier ID tags. Sometimes an engraved ring or a local’s testimony is enough. Then the hunt begins to link the remains to a family of a lost loved one. “It’s technical and emotional work and we make no distinction between the people we find,” says Joachim Kozlowksi, who heads the hunt for remains.

“All those buried here in Halbe were very young people, some didn’t even know how to spell Wehrmacht but were drafted all the same.”

This week's burial is a sobre yet emotional event. Locals and visitors fight back tears; uniformed former Bundeswehr soldiers with drawn faces hum along as a brass band plays The Good Comrade. Honouring the war dead is a cultural touchstone in the former Allied countries but remains a moral minefield here, even as the Nazi era passes over the historical horizon.

Revisionist danger

While most agree that individual victims of the war deserve a respectful burial, some fear the thin end of a revionist wedge towards a Wehrmacht-SS hero cult. For many, Halbe is synonymous with this dilemma, scene of several neo-Nazi marches in the past.

Modified assembly laws aim have put a stop to such instrumentalisation of the graveyard and locals quote the words of the graveyard’s founding pastor, Ernst Teichmann: “These were not heroes, these were men who wanted to go home.”

In his burial ceremony speech, foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier walks a historical tightrope, recalling not just the 27,000 German soldiers here but also the 20,000 Russians and estimated 10,000 locals who died in one of many senseless battles of spring 1945 pushed by Berlin's criminal regime.

The final insult against basic principles of humanity, Steinmeier says, was the cynical decision to send out children and older men to their doom, facing down the Red Army as part of the so-called "Volkssturm". "This couldn't change the outcome of the war, simply drive up the terrible death count in the last months," he says. In the peaceful forest graveyard, the crowd throws handfuls of soil on to the row of coffins in the grave and drifts away.

But Heinz Rothe remains standing, lost in memory. He survived the war and returned home to Berlin in 1950, after six years in a prisoner of war camp. His father, who survived the first World War, was drafted into the Volkssturm.

“On April 23rd,” he says, “my father was shot dead by the Russians near our home.”