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German fight graves are being foul on TV

  • January 13, 2016

In Mar 1942 my good grandparents were sensitive that their eldest son, Heinrich, had been killed in movement during a unit operation in a area of Krasnaya-Ghorka, in a swamps and hunger forests south of Leningrad in Russia. He was a initial of their 3 sons they would remove during a war, a other dual were killed in movement in 1944 and 1945.

They were told that Heinrich had been buried on a local funeral belligerent in a place famous as Glubotschka, 12 kilometres south-west of Tosno. For my good grandparents these names were customarily as visitor and formidable to place as they were for me, when we started researching Heinrich’s troops career in 2006.

While during a time of Heinrich’s genocide a tomb lay some-more or reduction protected behind German lines, that altered when a Soviets non-stop their descent to soothe Leningrad in Jan 1944. Glubotschka was overshoot and it shortly became forgotten, fell into irregularity and was reclaimed by inlet shortly afterwards. As a encampment itself, like so many others in a region, was never reoccupied after a fight it did not take prolonged to disappear off a maps completely. Glubotschka became a name of a region, that could customarily found on some problematic Soviet-era maps.

Robin Schäfer’s great-uncle Heinrich Gilgenbach’s stays are mislaid perpetually interjection to wildcat pledge archaeologists. Photo: Robin Schäfer collection

After about 2 years of work, regulating veterans’ accounts and information found in a array of German regimental fight diaries, we managed to pinpoint a plcae on complicated satellite maps. In 2008 some friends in St. Petersburg did me an implausible foster and trafficked into a solitude of swamps and forests south of a city in wish of anticipating a place where Heinrich had been buried.

I was over a moon when a integrate of days after they sent me some photographs by email and let me know that they had found a stays of a encampment and a German cemetery, that was still noted by 3 vast gritty tumuli. It wasn’t prolonged before we was means to spend a week in St. Petersburg to have a demeanour during a plcae myself. My Russian friends had found a scold spot. It was untouched, disproportionate by weed and hunger trees and a graves mounds clearly visible.

When we returned to Germany we sent a minute to a German fight graves elect (the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge or VDK) informing them about a discovery. Finally, after all those decades we would be means to move during slightest one of my grandmother’s brothers home to Germany.

Personally we never got any approach feedback on my letter, so it came as a bit of warn when in 2011 we review that a Volksbund had staged an speed to Glubotschka to shovel a soldiers buried there. What we review came as a bit of a shock, as a essay in a Volksbund repository spoke of an speed to a “partly plundered” cemetery. My fears were reliable in a write call where we was told that a tomb had indeed been plundered. The organisation (consisting of German Reservists and portion Russian soldiers) had been means to shovel 21 bodies (out of some-more than 120 that should have been there). They had found dual Erkennungsmarken (dog-tags). 19 of a people found could not be identified. The stays of a other 99+ German soldiers had been strewn opposite a landscape.

My granduncle Heinrich had not been identified. In a years between my revisit and that of a exhumation celebration Russian black-diggers had struck. By retrieving valuables, apparatus and dog-tags they had well broken a identities of some-more than 119 German soldiers. By hidden their names and identities they were killed a second time. They are now left forever.

Even nonetheless Heinrich was ‘lucky’ adequate to have been buried in a purebred funeral place in 1942 (something denied to his dual brothers who distortion where they fell in a steppes of Russia and a margin somewhere in Silesia), he has disappeared. His grandson will never have a possibility to revisit his grave.

His dog-tag, like so many others, competence have finished adult on eBay. It competence have fetched a cost of 15 or 20 dollars and maybe it forms partial of someone’s WW2 vestige collection right now.

Nearly a million German soldiers still rest on mislaid cemeteries and terrain all over what was once Soviet Russia. Every German family has a father, a grandfather, an uncle or hermit who never came behind from a Ostfront and who is now resting in a bombard void or embankment somewhere in Stalingrad, Demjansk, Courland, a Crimea and in large other places where German soldiers fought and died. Every year thousands of those organisation are effectively killed a second time by those who make a good vital by offered their equipment, their medals and their dog-tags.

A organisation of German soldiers with a flamethrower in front of a blazing farmhouse in a Soviet Union, 1941. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1974-099-19 / Kempe

While in a past decades these ‘black-diggers’ have been essentially Russian, a discerning demeanour on YouTube and several “collectors” play on a internet shows that currently their ranks are swelled by steel detecting collectors from Holland, Great Britain, France, America and even Germany. The astringency of repairs that is finished by those people can’t be described in words.

I was among those who fought opposite a screening of “NAZI WAR DIGGERS” when it was initial announced in 2014 and we happily assimilated a ravel again, when we schooled that Channel 5 was to uncover in Britain underneath a new name of “BATTLEFIELD RECOVERY”.

I can frequency report how most this uncover offends me, so we try to sum adult my categorical concerns as quickly as possible.

I know that a producers of a uncover worked with semi-official organisations in Poland and Latvia (Pomost and Legenda). Having witnessed a exhumation of WW2 casualties myself, we know that a methods used by groups such as this are substantially not state-of-the-art archaeological techniques. Looking during a mass of bodies (both Russian and German) that are still out there, these groups work to grasp discerning results, especially perplexing to settle an marker of stays found. Yes, infrequently their complicated appurtenance is parked on a mouth of a hole and yes, they do not customarily wear helmets or protecting shoes. Nevertheless, they do a good pursuit for both a German and a Russian fight graves commission.

I do not have a problem with that. we also do not mind that a troops apparatus these groups find competence not indispensably finish adult in Museums. Military museums all over Russia, Latvia and Poland are congested with rusty pillage and it is no consternation that they are not meddlesome in nonetheless another rusty steel helmet. we do not have a problem with that either.

What we have a problem with is, that instead of producing a documentary on a good work these groups do, ClearStory chose instead to emanate to what amounts to a array of advertisements compelling bootleg digging for corpse in a greatest, free-of-charge militaria store in a world.

And not customarily that, instead of regulating a gifted veteran archaeologists they had indeed approached for recommendation and afterwards ignored, ClearStory done a scornful choice of selecting a eminent play of ‘Nazi’ militaria and a garland of British steel detectorists with no applicable knowledge whatsoever to horde a show. By dropping them into locations selected by a professionals of Legenda and Pomost and by creation it seem that it is indeed roughly wholly them (and customarily them) who are doing a digging, they have combined what is to me and many other people a inexpensive and nasty square of radio that is expected to lure dozens of steel detectorists to go ‘over there’ to puncture adult a steel helmet and a cold appurtenance gun themselves.

Hundreds of books like this one available German famillies’ unfortunate hunt for information about a predestine of their desired ones after a war. Photo: Robin Schäfer collection

The uncover has 0 educational value. we unsuccessful to hear any discuss of how many millions of Russian and German organisation are still out there in unmarked graves. we unsuccessful to hear any convincing outline of a Courland battles, or a terrible massacres that happened in and around Poznan in Jan 1945. The hosts of a uncover have no couple to a organisation whose stays they are digging up.

Faced with a formidable set of tellurian remains, or an unexploded munition they seem definitely clueless (which is presumably since they are indeed definitely clueless about a genuine meanings and dangers of these things). In fact all too mostly they act like children personification soldiers, treating guns as large toys and a fact that Mr. Gottlieb manages to force himself to fist out a few tears for a camera whenever he handles a skull or bone does not make it any better. For me it creates it even worse.

Not customarily due to my family history, though also due to my pursuit as a troops historian, we brand with a depressed and their families. we have spent unmeasurable time looking during a faces of a blank in a detailed registers published by a German Red Cross in a early 1950s. Millions of faces, millions of stories of organisation whose final resting place is different and whose identities are wiped out by bootleg digging. Illegal digging, that is (in my opinion and that of many experts who are not listened in a films) customarily promoted by “BATTLEFIELD RECOVERY”.

This contingency not be authorised to continue.

Robin Schäfer is a German troops historian specializing in a duration between 1800 and 1945. His initial book, “Fritz and Tommy: Across a Barbed Wire” was published in Oct 2015.

This essay originally seemed during The Pipeline.

Article source: http://www.thelocal.de/20160113/german-war-graves-being-desecrated-on-british-tv

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