Burying German War Dead

[kaima]

It may seem strange, but in Germany they will bury a citizen for 25 years and move them if the rent is not paid for antoehr 25. However, when it comes to Germans who died invading other countries, they have an organization who collects their remains and arranges official cemetaries so the dead soldiers can rest in one place - one foreign land - forever. That is strangely at odds with the American fixation on bringing back the last scrap of blown up body on foreign soil. Here we have some soldiers from WW II lost in a warehouse for four years. The Germans could ahve simply brought them home, but instead they let them rest in the warehouse until they find room for burial in the Czech Republic... strange indeed!

www.praguepost.com/P03/2006/Art/0330/news4.php

Gov't jumps in on case, but local officials seem to have it resolved

By Kristina Alda
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 29, 2006
It looked as if authorities on the local level had reached a solution on how to deal with 4,000 boxes containing the remains of German World War II soldiers discovered recently in a warehouse outside this industrial city.

But now the national government is involved.

President Václav Klaus sent letters March 24 to Regional Development Minister Radek Martínek, Defense Minister Karel Kühnl and Prague Mayor Pavel Bém, telling them to help resolve the situation, a week after the discovery.

Klaus stepped in several days after Ústí Mayor Petr Gandaloviè convened a meeting of the border region's Czech and German authorities to address the situation. In a show of cooperation that speaks to how much relations between the two countries seem to have improved in recent years, Gandaloviè said the remains could stay in Ústí until the German People's Union for the Care of War Graves (VDK) finds a suitable place to finally bury them.

The VDK, which exhumed the remains three years ago in the hopes of reburying them in Prague, promised in return to transfer the remains to a cemetery as soon as possible. In the meantime, it promised to provide the warehouse with 24-hour security to ward off looters and to prevent potential attacks by extremist groups.

"I think everyone understands this is a question of ethics," Gandaloviè told The Prague Post. "It hasn't created any tensions between Czechs and Germans."

But it appears to have done so within the Czech government. Prime Minister Jiøí Paroubek said the government should not be involved in the matter. But he did criticize Gandaloviè, a member of the senior opposition Civic Democrats for not tackling the situation more quickly.

"We have already done the maximum we could," Gandaloviè said.


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[kaima]

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Healing a war-torn past

Gandaloviè said Ústí authorities had no idea there were German remains stored in the warehouse, which sits in an industrial park on the city's outskirts.

The VDK leased the space in the warehouse from a private company three years ago, after it discovered it did not have the money to properly rebury the remains. Although Ústí city police are still investigating the case, it doesn't look as though any burial laws have been broken. Nor do the boxes of remains pose any sort of hygiene risk to the locals.

Fritz Kirchmeier, a spokesman for the VDK, said his organization is currently looking into three possible locations for the reburial of the remains, but he did not go into detail.

"What we're doing," Kirchmeier said, "is above all about reconciliation. There are no heroes. There are no monumental tombstones." According to Kirchmeier, proper burial of the soldiers is an important step in Europe's ability to put its war-torn past behind it.

The 200,000-member VDK is a nongovernmental organization based in Kassel, Germany, that has been working for the past 87 years to rebury German soldiers across Europe in marked, dignified graves.

So far, it has done 827 reburials in Europe, 10 in the Czech Republic. Remains are buried in the countries in which the soldiers died. Ninety percent of VDK funding comes from sponsor gifts from the relatives of German soldiers.

The VDK could only start its work in this country after the opening up of the borders following the fall of the Iron Curtain. According to Vladimír Kaiser, director of the Ústí nad Labem Archives, there could be as many as 80,000 more German soldiers buried in mass graves across the Czech Republic.

Kirchmeier says the VDK's efforts haven't met with any more hostility in the Czech Republic than elsewhere in Europe.

"Of course people remember the war crimes of the Germans," he says. "And we have to discuss it with them. Part of our job is starting dialogue."


— Petr Kašpar and Sarah Schaschek contributed to this report.

[Jaga]

Kai,

interesting development. But I think, that the remains of the enemies should remain in the soil if possible. I am surprised by what Germans are doing to their own. Maybe the family should pay for more than 25 years and this should solve the problem.

You know, here in the US there is very little interest in the taking care of people after they died. Nobody visits the graves, not even family, only if this is the ARlington cemetary or something special. In Poland, the cemeteries are really taken care of. The Saint Day is unusual, you should go there and see. I wonder how is it in Slovakia, it must be similar.

[nancy]

admin said:

You know, here in the US there is very little interest in the taking care of people after they died. Nobody visits the graves, not even family, only if this is the ARlington cemetary or something special. In Poland, the cemeteries are really taken care of.

I guess it depends on the location and family. Maybe in Idaho the families that you know do not visit the cemeteries, but at least here in Mass they sure do, and not just on Memorial Day (on Memorial Day weekend there are real crowds)

Every time I visit my parents' grave on Cape Cod, I see a number of people there, including but not limited to the groundskeepers. I tend their plot, plus a couple of others that belong to people who were their friends and have no living family. It is a nice, park-like place.

I had just the opposite experience in Poland. The large cemetery beside the church in Kozlowek was neat and well kept in the front, but the older part in the back was like a meadow of wildflowers. (Actually I thought it was beautiful and took pictures, my husband was shocked that it was so unkempt.)

When we went to the small village of Piatkowa, no one in the family knew where some of the old family graves were - they said some might have been paved over for the road, no one really kept track. (Now I was shocked! This is not tending to the gravesites!) I think they also have term graves in Poland - more often than in the US where you need a court order to have a casket exhumed (except in New Orleans, where I believe they do have term graves because of lack of space).

[Jaga]

Nancy,

I was not only in Idaho. I was in Texas and the cemeteries were empty, no any fresh flowers. Although I saw my mother in law and John's sister to do the effort and put flowers into their ancestors graves. I remember once even John Chmielewski mentioned that the cemeteries do not look like before but you are right I was not in Mass on Memorial Day.

[franek80]

Nancy;
Your post about cemeteries was very interesting..Back in Baltimore we had ST,casimirs and St.Stans Polish churches that banded together and used the same Cemetery.. It is well kept and one can see new flowers left by loved ones all the time,, But in back they have a field of unconsetrated ground.. It is sad.. There are babies born out of wedlock and people that have been excomunicated for some reason or the other...It looks like Potters field. That makes me so mad.. I always ask the question WHY

[nancy]

admin said:

Nancy,

I was not only in Idaho. I was in Texas and the cemeteries were empty, no any fresh flowers.

Here in Massachusetts we are actually not allowed to put fresh flowers loosely on the graves, except on Memorial Day weekend when we can leave planters -- then on Tuesday the ground crews pick them up and throw them away! We can plant flowers, some people leave small statues, etc., but no bouquets.

In Texas, I think the weather would preclude leaving fresh flowers since they would not last more than an hour or two.

Plastic flowers? I hate those, but I think I have seen them both here in the US and in Poland. They look good from a distance.

[nancy]

franek80 said:

Nancy;
Your post about cemeteries was very interesting..Back in Baltimore we had ST,casimirs and St.Stans Polish churches that banded together and used the same Cemetery.. It is well kept and one can see new flowers left by loved ones all the time,, But in back they have a field of unconsetrated ground.. It is sad.. There are babies born out of wedlock and people that have been excomunicated for some reason or the other...It looks like Potters field. That makes me so mad.. I always ask the question WHY

Frank,

That is another reason why I left the church. I recall a conversation I had with our priest when I was a teenager... about why certain bodies could not be buried in consecrated ground - suicides, for example..

I decided then and there to be cremated when I die - that was against the Church at that time, but now they allow it.

Here is a "bizarre" story, I guess it shows the Church has changed since I was a teen. A few years ago, a man I know killed himself. He and his family were Catholic, attended the church here in town.

The funeral was held in the Church, and an hour or so before the service, the priest and the man's family met in the church. They uncovered him, and "rebaptised" him ... so now he was a freshly baptised Catholic and could be buried frm the Church - with Mass, burial in consecrated ground, etc. Mind you, the man had been dead for 3 days at this point. ....

I think the Church does whatever serves its purpose, in this case to keep the rest of the family in the fold.