Germans and Poles are co-operating to try to retrieve bodies for burial, writes MADELINE CHAMBERSin Berlin
ONE MARCH day in the last weeks of the second World War, more than 70 children squeezed into a plane designed for 14 hoping to be flown to safety from the advancing Soviet tanks in northeastern Germany.
Minutes after take-off, the plane dived into an icy lake, killing everyone on board.
Nearly 70 years later, former enemies Germany and Poland are joining forces to try to raise the wreck from Resko Przymorskie in western Poland.
“The idea that whenever I went to the lake, I was walking by an open grave with so many children made me uneasy. To me, what we are doing is a natural thing,” says Zdzislaw Matusewicz, mayor of Trzebiatow.
“Children are innocent in war – that applies to German as well as Polish children.”
The Polish mayor is working with Germany’s war graves commission to retrieve the remains of the mostly unidentified children and four crew, and bury them in a nearby war cemetery.
Barely any of the children’s identities are known but, since the project began, some people have come forward, hoping to obtain details about family members who went missing without trace in the chaotic last months of the war.
“This is a very big project. It is technically difficult and a real challenge,” says Wolfram Althoff, Germany’s special representative for the project, which both sides say is an important symbol of how far they have come in putting behind them a war in which six million Poles died.
Schools on both sides of the border are raising funds to help foot a bill for raising the wreck, which officials say could reach as much as €150,000 – if it proves possible at all.
Last month, a group of German schoolchildren took part in an anniversary ceremony at the lakeside, and schools have also launched an appeal for possible relatives of the victims to come forward.
The end of communism has allowed the war graves commission to reinter hundreds of thousands of war dead from eastern Europe in the last two decades.
The neighbours have been drawn closer together by Poland’s entry into the EU and strong economic ties which have seen tens of thousands of Poles finding work in Germany.
Tensions still remain, however, particularly over a group which lobbies for the rights of Germans expelled from territory which became Polish after the war, which wields considerable influence within chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc.
The head of Germany’s Arnold Zweig Europe School in Pasewalk says attending a ceremony at the lakeside last month was a live lesson in German-Polish history for his pupils.
“We wanted children involved because they are the people who have least to do with war,” says headmaster Norbert Haack.
“We want to show that we Germans stand together with Poles, although – and we made this clear – the war was started by Germans.”
Germany evacuated hundreds of thousands of civilians westwards in early 1945.
It is unclear if the Soviets brought down the aircraft or if it crashed simply because it was overloaded.
The Dornier 24 was a flying boat, designed to rescue shipwrecked people but, by the end of the war, Germany used it to transport refugees.
“The pilots flying the planes knew they were too heavy. Each time they took off, they hoped they’d make it,” he said.
Only about two months before the tragedy at the lake, a Soviet submarine sank the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic Sea, killing about 9,000 civilian evacuees, six times as many as the number that drowned on the Titanic.