Dead bodies are still being recovered decades after the war
Every year, the bodies of 300 to 800 German soldiers who died in the Second World War are laid to rest at the cemetery in Stare Czarnowo, Poland. "We assumed that work would gradually cease at the beginning of the 2020s. But there are still graves and war dead that we are recovering," said Karsten Richter, Managing Director of the War Graves Commission MV, on the occasion of the National Day of Mourning on Sunday. The state association looks after the war cemetery in Stare Czarnowo.
The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge receives 30,000 inquiries about individuals nationwide every year by telephone, email or direct contact. "This concerns the Second World War, but in some cases also the First World War. People are moved by these individual fates," Richter told the German Press Agency. In many families, the grandchildren's generation or the older generation of children ask what happened to their grandfather or father.
"That still moves people almost 80 years after the war. And I guess it will be similar with other wars like today in Ukraine and the Middle East. These are the terrible aspects of war that will continue to have an impact for decades and generations to come."
The military cemetery in the Polish municipality of Stare Czarnowo in the district of Glinna, south-east of Szczecin, is the last of 13 cemeteries for German soldiers in Poland. The war cemetery offers space for around 32,500 graves. To date, around 24,000 coffins of war dead are buried there. In 2022 there were 345.
A memorial service with Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania's Minister of the Interior Christian Pegel (SPD) was to take place at the cemetery on Saturday. The German War Graves Commission is a humanitarian organization that records, maintains and cares for the graves of German war dead abroad on behalf of the German government.
According to the association, there are over 12,000 war graves in Germany, where more than 1.8 million German and foreign dead from the First and Second World Wars were laid to rest. The preservation of these graves is a state task enshrined in the Basic Law, which is mostly carried out at local authority level.
The Second World War is a topic of ongoing interest, with families regularly inquiring about the fates of their deceased relatives. Despite being almost 80 years since the end of the war, the terrible impacts of war continue to resonate, as evident in the ongoing recovery of war dead in various conflicts, such as in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Source: www.dpa.com
