Hundreds of thousands of dead lie in German soldiers' cemeteries in Eastern Europe. Some members of the family continue to search for seventy years after the war - in the hope of finding inner peace.
Block D, row 12. Rosemarie Mill has fixed the coordinates firmly. The cemetery is situated on a slope above the river. Cultivated lawn, mighty trees. Slowly the evening sun shines forth under the storm clouds. So many crosses, so many granite tablets, so many names. 11 799 soldiers lie on Estonia's largest German soldier cemetery near the border town Narva. Quietly flows the river of the same name, the wooden houses on the other bank already belong to Russia. Mill comes out of the bus to the pavement, then to the cemetery gate. She is wearing a bag on her wrist. She squeezes the green paper folder with the papers. The 76-year-old has arranged the memories of her father in clear-cut films.
The letters of the war grave. The letter of condolence of the company commander. Yellowed photographs: the dog-party, in which the corporal Hessel did his duty. The proud father on front leave. "That's me," says Mühle, pointing to the baby in a baby carriage. She never knew her father. When the paramedics fell at the beginning of the Russian campaign, Rosemarie Mill was one and a half years old. "As a child, I always wanted him," says Mühle. She closes her eyes. "I've been looking for him everywhere."
In the meantime, the cemetery worker has found the right stele. Fifty names are engraved on each side of the man-made granite boards. Erich Hessel, Gefreiter, born 10.7.1905, fallen on the 22nd of September 1941.
For half an eternity, Rosemarie Mühle has been waiting for this moment. She unwinds the two sets of flowers from the paper, rests with one hand on the stele, and starts talking softly to her father. "You missed me so much." Her hand crushes the handkerchief.
She takes the things from the bag and places them on the lawn, which is still wet from the rain. An angel, a small steampane with the portrait of the father, a candle. The wick will not burn in the wind. Then Mill speaks a prayer and reads a church member. The small ceremony takes only a few minutes. But for Rosemarie's mill she is not small. "I always wanted to see what it looked like," she says. She looks relieved.
Like Hans Andree. He has visited the grave of his uncle for the first time, "on behalf of the cousin." His own father is located in the east of Ukraine. There, says Andree, there is war, not a good moment to visit a German soldiers' cemetery. Andree has brought a jam jar with homemade, which he empties next to the grave. It comes from his garden, the land where his father and uncle lived. "There is a photograph on which the two are exactly where I took the earth."
Andree is a pastor, a former farmer, not a man of great words. He stands briefly at the grave. But that is not the point. He looks pleased when he leaves the cemetery. His limping intensifies the impression that he has come from far away. It's all right, says Andree, knowing where the uncle is. To have a picture. Finally, to say good-bye personally.
On the second day of the tour the most important question is clarified: Why do people travel thousands of kilometers to the graves of relatives who have died more than seventy years ago? Of relatives who know them only from stories? They do it for themselves. For the family. For a dead person, who is also an integral part of her own life. They do it to find a degree. Usually only in old age. "Fortunately, I've managed it," says Rosemarie Mühle as she sinks back to her seat on the bus.
Nine soldiers' cemeteries are driven on the one-week tour through Estonia and Latvia, and almost every of the 17 participants of this memorial journey sits on the bus to mourn the grave of a relative. They are not the medieval old towns, art nouveau facades and castles, not the lakes and forests, the seaside resorts and the beaches that are also visited. They are the dead who connect the living on this journey and bring them into conversation with each other. At dinner, during sightseeing, and on the long journeys anyway. The Second World War is also a legacy, passed on to the war children and warlords, its trauma continues to affect the families. No wonder almost all participants feel the journey to the graves as liberating.
For decades, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge has organized such family trips. Many of them now lead to former Eastern bloc states, which were hardly accessible before. 15 to 20 trips are offered every year, with about thirty being organized by the national associations. The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge is responsible for 832 war grave sites on behalf of the federal government in 45 states - the graves of 2.7 million war dead. This also includes advising relatives, cultivating graves, burying bones, organizing mourning events and youth welfare - and those memorial trips. In the online databases of the war grave, the names of millions of dead and missing are.
There are always a few lectures about the work of the association in the bus. Wolfgang Hoerle, the travel companion, is sitting next to the Estonian tourist guide. The 72-year-old has been serving as a garden and landscape architect for a decade of soldiers' cemeteries, and has witnessed the changes in the work of the war grave-care service since 1990. With the end of the Cold War, Hoerle says, a whole new phase has begun. Suddenly, agreements were concluded with countries which had previously built up and planned German soldiers' cemeteries.
More than 850,000 war kills, including deportees, refugees, forced laborers and concentration camp victims, have since been found and buried in the former Warsaw Pact states. Some of them could be identified, for example by means of recognition marks. Suddenly, new cemeteries had to be built. Hundreds of new retirements. Every year more and more dead were found. In excavation pits. In forests and marshes. Under sports facilities. In some areas the earth is still full of bones. "We were not prepared for that," Hoerle says.
For the war grave care began also a race with the time. While the rescue and rehabilitation work in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, the Baltic States and other Eastern European countries, the relatives die. And with them the members and donors. The federal government and the Länder are only responsible for about one third of the budget.
Who will visit the cemeteries in the future when the children, nieces and nephews of the dead are no longer there? Her friends, wives and siblings have almost died. In the coming years the personal memory of the dead soldiers will inevitably go out. But still it is not so far.
"I feel committed to the fallen comrade," says Diethard Kollat, asking why he had made the trip to Estonia and Latvia. The 79-year-old lieutenant-colonel is one of three travelers who have no mourning in the Baltics. "Fortunately, nobody has caught our family," he says. Kollat is an officer through and through. Zackig, a bit stiff and a profound expert in military history. Always the first to get off the bus. With his arms crossed behind his back, he now stands between the graves of the cemetery of Jöhvi. "I am convinced that death eradicates the blame," Kollat says, "so it is right to remember the dead, even if they were wrong."
The former battalion commander, tactician and counselor in the Ministry of Defense has been thinking a lot about ethical questions. At least for a moment he always stands before the Soviet honorary mark. They exist in almost every village. "I really feel the same as in the German cemeteries," he says. "The poor fellows, died for a madness." He stops in front of an obelisk on which the Sovietstern is sitting. The others from the group have already gone on to the shores of Lake Peipus. It is beautiful here, quiet. Small coves, fishing nets, villages where onions are grown and sold. On the roofs are stork nests.
Sylke Schulte-Beckhausen, the youngest in the group with fifty years, pulls out the shoes and stands in shallow water. Somebody is hopping a stone over the lake, the couple Hons posing for a photo album in a stranded rowing boat. "Magnificent," says Rosemarie Mühle. She is not the only one who feels back in her childhood from the rural environment.
While walking across the high bank of the lake, the group crosses a cemetery. A local, civilian cemetery this time. The crosses stand, as is usual in Estonia, in a light forest. A colorful, lively mess. Everywhere flowers and pictures, everywhere is patched and patched. Wolfgang Hoerle leaned against the wall and was delighted. "I find such cemeteries great," says the former horticulture architect, "so lovingly."
A contrast, in any case, to the war graveyards, all of which are strictly ordered and cultivated. The facilities are similar to each other, even if the cemetery of Viljandi, where the group arrives in the evening, is relatively small. Identical crosses on green grass. Name plates. A central place. Like all German soldiers' cemeteries that were built after the end of the war, this memorial is free of pathos. In such plants, no heroes are revered; everyone should feel it. "Almost still children," muttered someone. Many of the men, as seen in the annual figures, died as adolescents.
When one of the travelers visits the grave of his relative, the others cautiously support him. Together we search for the right block and the right row. One withdraws, if the mourner wants to be alone, one remains near, if after him talks. Manfred Zerban wants to talk. He tells of his father's death. The gunner was hit by grenade splinters when he was sitting comfortably in the sun with the group's observers. In the hospital the leg was amputated, a few days later Herbert Zerban died of a blood-poisoning of 29 years.
His son wraps a bouquet of colorful cornflowers from newspaper paper. "And then came the famous letter," says Manfred Zerban: "For Fiihrer, People and Fatherland." Too much is not what he knows of his father. The fact that he resembled him always meant always. Manfred Zerban, 77, is the last of his family. He has no children, his brother has died. At the age, says Zerban, the early memories became more conscious. Perhaps the wish to visit the grave of the father, therefore, had matured more and more within him in the past few years.
The journey to the dead is also a journey to childhood. There is much talk about her in the bus. From childhood without the father. More than about the men is talked about the mothers. Young women who should be strong. Manfred Zerban recalls how difficult his mother was. Alone with the two boys. Only in the air-raid shelter, during the endless air raids. Then, after the small family had been bombed, in search of a new place. "The women have worked, they've managed everything."
It is surprisingly open talked on this trip. About persecution and propaganda, about persecution and flight, about the displaced of today. And also about the traces left behind by war and national socialism in Germany, in front of their own doorstep. Manfred Zerban tells about a bike ride on the bus, which he did a few weeks ago on the Swabian Alb. One of his stations was Grafeneck, a castle, beautifully situated on a hill. "It was a healing and nursing home before the Nazis turned it into a death factory." He noted the number of gassed patients in Grafeneck, 10 564. "I drove on this avenue with its beautiful trees," he says, "Exactly where the gray buses came with the sick." Then Zerban's voice breaks. He, who remained at the grave of the father, now has tears in his eyes.
Again and again the Volksbund German war grave was under suspicion of transporting revanchist ideas. After all, the organization, founded in 1919, was part of the Nazi propaganda machine. A chapter in the history of the association, which its members hardly worked up in the post-war period. Why, ask critics, was the organization simply continued? Not even the weakened name was changed. And there were always old comrades in the war grave, men who, with the official motto of the "Reconciliation on the Graves", seemed to be very few. There are still isolated attempts to collect by right-wing groups.
The way in which the tsunami has been distanced from such tendencies has become clear at the memorial ceremony on Estonia's largest island. The occasion is an anniversary: Twenty years ago the Kuressaare War Memorial was opened. The weather is tipped. It is raining, the lawn smacks of moisture. Local dignitaries and the Estonian military are gathered in the cemetery, representatives of the war grave and the Federal Government. Veterans are posted in wheelchairs in their places of honor, a music corps plays against the cloudburst.
A ditch gapes in the green meadow. In front of him are six black miniature coffins. In the short, narrow boxes lie the bones of soldiers who were recovered in the past months on the island. Only one of the dead, it is said, was identified by name.
The rain dripping from pelts and uniforms, umbrellas and wind instruments. A steel helmet has been placed over the raw crossborder at the foot of the graves. The rain also runs down.
With its small round glasses and the twisted Kaiser-Wilhelm-Bart, the German military attache acts like a relic of times past. What the representative of the Federal Government in his speech says, leaves no doubt in his attitude. "After the Second World War and millions of dead civilians and soldiers, after a genocide of the Jews and the Sinti and Roma," says Konstantin Bellini, "for many Germans was an honorable public commemoration of people who left their lives during their military service "Bellini speaks of mass murder, the inhuman treatment of prisoners of war, and the massive rape of women by military soldiers. Only then does he continue. "Today we can commemorate the German victims because we also commemorate the victims of the Germans. But we are painfully aware that among the fallen Germans, who were mourned and mourned by their loved ones, were not a few who first killed themselves before they were killed. "In the coming days there is still talk about the commemoration. Bellini's words came well in the travel group.
Meanwhile the bus arrived in Latvia. Before the next Kriegsgräberstätte is on the program, a private war museum is to be visited in a remote hamlet. Ilgvars Brucis, a Latvian collector, brought together in Zante what he found in the woods. Bullets and shells, helmets and weapons, soldbooks, plates, shaving brushes and bandages. Space for space is crowded with the remains of the Kurland battles. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers from the Northern Army group were, together with Latvian aid troops, being surrounded by the Red Army. They did not capitulate until May 8, 1945.
"Like most of the boys in this area, I'd rather go out on a search for militaria than school," says Ilgvars Brucis. In camouflage clothes he stands between jeeps, tanks and amphibious vehicles. The "black archeology" is considered a normal hobby here. "The ground is still full of ammunition," says Brucis, pointing to his exhibits. "You can see that this war was not a video game."
The visit to the museum leaves mixed feelings in the travel group. "Komische Kauz," most of them find - and yet are glad about the bizarre instruction lessons.
One last cemetery still. The complex in Saldus is surrounded by rustling birches and creaking pines. Broad land. You can imagine lynx and bear wandering through the neighboring woods.
"For me it is a big burden that I do not know where my father is," says Rolf Piske. The 76-year-old is the most silent in the group. He carefully studied the inscriptions on the floorboards, even now. Perhaps the father's name still appears somewhere. "This is, of course, completely irrational," he says. Piske's father is among the innumerable missing persons of the Second World War. He is probably somewhere in Poland, buried in a mass grave. At least there is some evidence.
At the beginning of the nineties, Rolf Piske was on the road for the first time with the war grave. To Volgograd, the former Stalingrad. "I was deeply concerned about being abused," Piske says. "The city had practically been razed to the ground by German troops." But the opposite was the case. "We have been warmly welcomed." Almost shamefully, he found the hospitality of the Russians in this place of horror. "We were shown pictures of 1943, when the dead were dumped on the Volga, because the ground was frozen, and the bodies floated in the spring to the Caspian Sea."
Piske has not let go of the warp. He traveled to El Alamein and Tunis, to Moscow, Murmansk and Novgorod, to the Crimea, to Finland and Poland. More than a dozen times he was on the road with the war grave. He says, "I have experienced reconciliation and friendships on my own. I will not miss that. "Then he turned back to the inscriptions
