When Daniel and Victoria Van Beuningen first toured their future home, a quiet villa in the Polish city Wroclaw, it had been abandoned for years, its windows sealed up with bricks. But something about its overgrown garden spoke to them. They could imagine raising chickens there, planting tomatoes and cucumbers. They could make something beautiful out of it, they thought — a place where their children could run and play.
They moved in knowing very little about what happened at the villa before World War II, when Wroclaw, formerly Breslau, was still part of Germany; or what occurred there during the war, when Soviet forces held the city under a brutal siege; or even what became of the house during the war’s aftermath, when hundreds of thousands of local Germans were forcibly resettled from what was now Polish territory. All their neighbors could tell them was that the villa had once housed a Communist newspaper.
Still, the couple wanted to know more, and their inquiries eventually led to the Meinecke family in Heidelberg, Germany, elderly siblings who said they were born in the home. Over a long afternoon, they showed the couple pictures of the place from happier times before the war, but they also offered the Van Beuningens a surprising warning: The couple might find the remains of some German soldiers buried in the garden. Maybe a few, maybe more; they couldn’t be certain.
The Van Beuningens didn’t quite know what to make of the claim, but it suddenly sounded more plausible when Daniel, digging a trench for a water pipe in his backyard, unearthed a Nazi-era helmet. It was around that time that Victoria received an unexpected knock on their door from, of all people, an archaeologist. His news unsettled the Van Beuningens even more — he had found documents that described an entire “war cemetery” located at their address. Could someone return to investigate? It was perhaps a coincidence of timing, but it was clear to the Van Beuningens that the answer had to be yes.
The archaeologist, it turned out, was contracted by a private organization in Germany, run largely by former military officers and little known to the public. The Volksbund, as the group was called, had an unusual mission: to find the graves of every German who died in the country’s many wars, and then give each a decent burial, no matter who they were or what they had done.
A team from the Volksbund descended on the Van Beuningen property with an excavator on a cold March day in 2023. Before long, the workers hit a layer of churned earth, a telltale sign that a grave lay below. The archaeologists paused to pull out trowels and paintbrushes so as to not to damage any bones. Victoria and her son leaned in to look as the diggers uncovered the remains of a young woman with a much smaller skull in her lap: a mother and child, just like us, Victoria thought. Her children, fascinated, asked if they could stay home from school the next day to watch. Their parents agreed, and all that week, the Van Beuningens looked on in astonishment at what emerged from the earth behind their home.
Most of these killing fields were simply paved over as Europeans sought to turn a new page — leaving the daunting task of finding the dead for future generations.
There were old rusted objects like keys and earrings. A pince-nez. A gold wedding ring. A large chain, and on it a medallion inscribed with the name of Wilhelm Korn. When someone lifted the remains of a Wehrmacht soldier, a doll fell onto the ground, perhaps belonging to the dead man’s daughter. The workers carefully accumulated bones, then sent them away in labeled crates. Where the Van Beuningens had pictured a garden, or maybe a swimming pool, there was now only a series of mounds. The final body count was staggering: 128 people.
Staggering but — at least for the Volksbund — not exactly surprising. Europe, in some ways, is a vast cemetery, littered with the remains of two world wars that killed, by conservative estimates, some 56.5 million people. Many simply vanished into the rubble, while others were hastily buried in unmarked graves. As countries rebuilt after the war, most of these killing fields were simply paved over as Europeans sought to turn a new page — leaving the daunting task of finding the dead for future generations. Many countries around the world have an organization like the Volksbund, but nowhere is this work more fraught than in Germany, where memory and forgetting are constantly bound up in a struggle to confront — or avoid — a guilt that was so vast that many references to the country’s nationalist past remain taboo even today. Germany is a place where the flag is rarely waved outside soccer games and giving the Nazi salute can be punished with a prison sentence. Germany’s response in the lead-up to the Russia-Ukraine war was hampered because it didn’t want to be seen as a military force.
Yet even as the country has sought to avoid reminders of its history, the remains of that past keep turning up — the war graves of 8,000 to 12,000 Germans are uncovered each year. Bones have been uncovered by excavators digging parking garages in German villages and by telephone workers laying fiber-optic cable where battles took place in the 1940s. At the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, soldiers outside Kyiv were digging trenches when they came across the skeleton of a man. He was a German soldier who died during the last war fought there, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union some 80 years before.
Complicating matters is the rise of the far right in Europe and around the world. For the first time since World War II, extremist parties have become ascendant across the region, and in places like Italy, Austria, Hungary and the Netherlands, these movements mirror — and in some cases trace their roots directly to — the fascist groups that triggered the war. In Germany, the charge is being led by the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which in February’s snap election became the second-largest party in Parliament, nearly doubling its seats there.
AfD has reshaped the German discourse on issues like immigration and climate change. But it is the party’s approach to the old taboos of the war that have collided most squarely with German norms. AfD leaders now denigrate what they call a “cult of guilt” around how the Nazi past is taught in schools, and they have reached out to figures of the American right for help. Before the February election, the tech billionaire Elon Musk stumped for the AfD after giving a Nazi-style salute at President Trump’s inauguration. “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” he told a crowd of AfD supporters at a rally. Weeks later, at a security conference in Munich, Vice President JD Vance threw his support to authoritarian movements across Europe, telling German leaders that there is “no room for firewalls” between extremist parties and the seats of power. The comment drew gasps in the room and a rebuke from Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who later said, “A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD.”
The commitment to “never again” raises hard questions for the Volksbund, which confronts the idea of guilt — individual or collective — with every disinterment. “Sometimes we have truly evil perpetrators,” says Dirk Backen, who heads the organization. “In some cases, we know the biographies, and we know that probably if they had survived the war they would have been put on trial and executed.” But sometimes the organization will instead find itself seeking a grave for the disinterred bodies of German mothers and their children who were cut down by Soviet artillery fire or, in a grayer zone, the corpse of a conscripted teenage soldier who was forced at gunpoint to murder Jews. These cases can reflect the complexity of history, but — as I found after many months of reporting on the Volksbund and its own, sometimes embattled history — they can also obscure it.
Germany’s search for its fallen soldiers begins in a lonely office park a two-hour train ride from Frankfurt. On a fall day, I met Arne Schrader, a retired army reserve major who heads the exhumations department at the Volksbund’s headquarters near Kassel, an industrial city in central Germany. Kassel was once filled with medieval buildings, but after it became a wartime manufacturing hub of the Nazis, Allied bombers flattened it into rubble. That changing landscape after the war presented one of the biggest challenges to finding the dead, Schrader told me. An archival map might show the exact place where a group of soldiers were buried, based on the location of a local church or an old street plan. But what if that church is gone, the streets remapped? “Now it’s only just a field,” Schrader said. “Where do you even begin?”
The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge — the organization’s full name translates roughly to the People’s League for the Care of German War Graves — was founded in 1919 as a private group to search for those lost in World War I. Members went door to door collecting change from war widows and their children, who hoped that the next time they heard from the Volksbund it would be with news about the fates of their loved ones. The Volksbund’s mandate is not just to find the bodies but also to decide where to put them — creating a kind of vertically integrated operation that first exhumes the dead, then reburies them, often in cemeteries it has established on the outskirts of towns, which the Volksbund cares for in perpetuity. Today it manages some 830 war cemeteries around the world, where 2.8 million Germans are buried. The Volksbund’s budget comes mainly from its members, many of them relatives of the dead. It leads tours of gravesites as points of departure to reflect on what participants would have done had they been in the shoes of the war’s victims. Die Toten verpflichten die Lebenden goes an old saying of the Volksbund — “the dead oblige the living.”
The sheer amount of remains unearthed, numbering in the millions of bones, makes DNA testing too costly, so researchers use other objects found with the skeletons as clues, like dog tags or letters from loved ones. As Schrader and I walked through the hall, we passed a collection of objects that survived the years alongside the bones of the dead: a rusted cross, a glass eye with a blue iris, a pocket watch with arms frozen at five minutes to 11.
Schrader produced a bottle that once held wine. It now contained a typewritten message with a name: Franz Tauber. He was born on July 16, 1918, and was a milkman before joining the war. Schrader asked a colleague to log into a database, but the results said the Volksbund had not yet found any descendants of Tauber. At the other end of the table sat hundreds of dog tags that were collected from exhumation sites, organized into piles of around a dozen. “Three hundred lives, sitting on a table,” he said. “Five hundred children left behind, maybe. Three hundred wives. Six hundred parents.” Schrader paused for a moment as his colleagues continued typing. “The question is: Why do we do this?”
He had not always been so philosophical, but when Schrader was a young lieutenant, he visited a Volksbund war cemetery in Belgium, the final destination of nearly 40,000 German soldiers, many of them the same age as Schrader and the rest of his paratrooper platoon. The stark reality of all those graves raised many questions for him about military violence and the moral culpability of those who fought. “What allows men to kill each other?” he asked himself. “What war can turn a nice, caring, family father in 1938 into a fighting machine in 1942 in Russia?”
Still, the living judge the dead. Very few families are interested in accepting the bones of Nazi ancestors when the Volksbund calls with the news of their discovery. Other groups have attacked the Volksbund’s work outright. In 2020, antifascist leaders began protesting when it became public that German officials had been attending ceremonies at a Volksbund graveyard in the Netherlands that held the remains of prominent Nazis, including Julius Dettmann, the SS officer who had Anne Frank arrested. They were joined by Jewish leaders who signed a petition calling the cemetery “the most racist and antisemitic place in the Netherlands.” The Volksbund brushes off such criticism: If Europe is to confront the damage done by its history of war, the group believes, then it must have places to remember the dead — including figures like Dettmann.
Some time after I returned from Germany, I looked up Arthur Graaff, the man who organized the petition against the cemetery. “Dead people need to be buried,” he said when I called him in the Netherlands. “You can’t just leave them lying there.” But the man who ultimately sent Anne Frank to her death? By offering him a tomb like anyone else, he said, the Volksbund had gone too far in its mission: It made Nazi dead look like the war’s victims, not its criminals, a goal that Graaff told me he suspected was behind the Volksbund’s desire to care for the graves.
I asked Graaff what he would do with the site if he were in charge. “I’d put an earthen wall around it,” he told me. “Let the brambles grow. That’s it.”
The Volksbund gets its leads from a variety of sources, and sometimes the source is the person who buried the bodies. In May 2023, a 98-year-old named Edmond Réveil told his local newspaper that he had something to confess. At 19, he had been part of the Maquis, a guerrilla group that fought the Nazi occupiers in France. In the last days of the war, his squad captured a group of 47 German soldiers. Instead of taking them to a P.O.W. camp, Réveil said, his squad took the prisoners to the outskirts of a village called Meymac, told them to dig their own graves, then shot them all dead, along with a Frenchwoman believed to be a collaborator. Réveil said the members of the squad all swore that day never to speak about what they did. Now they were all dead but him. He wanted people to know what happened, and — perhaps most important for the Volksbund — he said he still knew exactly where the bodies were buried.
When I arrived that summer, the old man had already led the Germans to a site about a 15-minute drive from the center of Meymac. But the passage of time had transformed the putative killing field: The once-barren hills were now covered by a towering forest of Douglas firs, planted after the war. Still, the Volksbund felt good about the site. Its ground radar system, though unable to detect bones, had sighted what looked like bullet casings and the evidence of disturbed earth.
As the Germans went about their work, I went looking for Réveil. His confession was a big news story in Europe — at least one reporter had staked out his home. But by the time I arrived in Meymac, the frenzy had calmed, and Réveil agreed to meet me for lunch at the home of his friend, the village dentist. He walked in wearing a checkered newsboy hat and brushed off all attempts to help him to the table; aside from a slight stoop, he cut a dashing figure for a man nearing his 100th birthday. “So you want to hear the whole story?” he asked after finding his seat.
His resistance squad, he said, was commanded by a former French reservist whose nom de guerre was Hannibal. On June 7, 1944, the squad attacked the city Tulle, and the next day it took 55 prisoners. The squad gave the soldiers the chance to join the resistance, but only a few among them did, mainly Czechs and Poles who had been conscripted by the Nazis. But the matter of the 47 Germans remained. There was no one to turn them over to, and the squad was too small to keep them. “When an order was received,” he said, “you just had to execute.”
Réveil said he ran into Hannibal crying after he received the order from one of his superiors; the commander, the only fighter among the French who spoke German, had gotten to know their captives, some of whom grew up along the same border as he had. No one wanted to kill the Frenchwoman — a collaborator, they were told, from a village called Saint-Pardoux. They drew lots, and the task fell to a man whose last name Réveil remembered as Texier, the brother of a local carpenter. After the trench was dug, Hannibal ordered the Germans who had pictures of their families to have one final look at them. The men they were about to kill were fathers to some and sons to others, Réveil told me. The prisoners were shot once — and then a second time to ensure they were dead, the “coup de grâce,” in Réveil’s words.
“My life is novel,” Réveil told me finally. “I don’t wish you to go through what I went through.” He finished his dessert, and then his son drove him home.
As the days passed with little progress in the search, the Volksbund workers grew tense. Right-wing collectors were fueling an online market for Nazi-era paraphernalia, and the workers feared that looters might sneak into the site at night looking for trophies. At the same time, the village was growing weary of the international spotlight. Meymac’s role in resisting the Nazis seemed clearly heroic until Réveil’s revelation. Now some online commentators were saying he had perpetrated a massacre. One day while I was on my phone in Meymac, I came across a pamphlet on the internet that wanted to set the record straight. “Resistance fighters are the opposite of war criminals!” it said, criticizing the journalists who wrote about the killings for sensationalizing them.
Over coffee, Céline Kompa, the local reporter who published the first article about Réveil, told me about how the town reacted to the news. “A lot of people would have preferred him to be quiet, not to say anything,” she said. “And I thought it was extremely courageous of him to speak up.” France, it seemed, had its own taboo when it came to speaking about what its fighters did during the war. All sides had something to be guilty of, she said, and war brought out the worst in everyone. “This is like pulling a ghost out of a closet.”
By late August, a rumor began to spread around the village that the search was not going well. Few people thought Réveil could have concocted such a dramatic story from scratch, and in fact some elements had been corroborated; more likely, it seemed, the remains were in another spot nearby. Réveil’s secret had been buried so long that it might be impossible to ever unearth. Ten days after the digging began, the Volksbund issued a statement saying it had found old coins and bullet casings from the war, but there were no skeletons at the site. “Unfortunately, such setbacks are part of our work,” the statement said, “but we are not giving up and are looking for more information.”
Some of the Volksbund’s discoveries come together far more quickly. Last April, I got a call asking if I could fly to Budapest: The group had unearthed what it believed was a mass grave of around 1,000 remains, along a highway near Hungary’s border with Serbia and Croatia. The ground there was sandy, which meant the excavation was moving more swiftly than usual, and I would need to get there soon if I wanted to arrive before they finished.
The history of this particular mass grave began with the 50-day siege of Budapest by Soviet and Romanian forces at the end of the war. By then, Hungary was ruled by its own fascist regime, the Arrow Cross Party, which killed thousands of civilians as it fought alongside its Nazi allies during just five months in power. By the time the Soviets finally took the city, the fighting was not just on the streets but had descended into the sewers, and more than 150,000 people would die.
On a sunny day last spring, I pulled up to a lot near an abandoned barracks from Hungary’s Communist years. The bones of hundreds of men, both Germans and Hungarians, lay in an open pit. I stepped out of the car to the sounds of birds singing mixed with the clink of shovels digging into sand. The pit dropped 10 feet down, and a Hungarian soldier who was working with the Volksbund gestured for me to join him at the bottom. Behind the soldier, sticking out from a wall, an army of bones had risen: Where once there were men, now there were ribs, fragments of sternum, pieces of vertebrae and teeth, everything sticking out from the earth. On the ground, other soldiers sat with paintbrushes dusting off the bones and placing them into groups; femur with femur, hip with hip. A collection of skulls covered a table, tree roots springing from where there once were eyes.
The soldiers whose bones we were looking at — Wehrmacht soldiers and Hungarians who fought with them — had survived the Soviet invasion and been sent as prisoners of war to a camp in a town called Baja. But after they arrived there, a sickness, most likely typhus, began to spread among them. They had lived through a world war — the oldest among them had probably survived two — only to die at a camp, mostly in their bedclothes. The sun broke through the clouds, and the Hungarian soldier and I simultaneously spotted something twinkling in the sand. It was a dog tag. A crowd of Hungarians and Germans quickly crowded around to examine it. Part of the birth date on the tag, July 29, was clear, but the year was rusted beyond legibility. The name was Péter Virág — his last name meant “flower” in Hungarian, a soldier told me.
The day after the exhumation, several Volksbund officials took me to a cemetery outside Budapest where the remains of many Germans who died during the 1944 siege were being buried. It was a quiet site with hundreds of white crosses and a stone engraved with a quote from Albert Schweitzer — “The soldiers’ graves are the greatest preachers of peace.”
The presence of the cemetery on Hungarian soil seems to have been accepted by the locals, but elsewhere the Volksbund’s gravesites have stirred up controversy. As I started to look into other cemeteries the Volksbund managed, I came across many disputes over the graveyards, some going back decades, and similar to the one involving the tomb of Anne Frank’s tormentor in the Netherlands.
In one case, the residents of Costermano, Italy, had discovered that Christian Wirth, an SS officer known as Christian the Cruel for having pioneered Hitler’s gassing and lethal-injection programs, was buried at a local Volksbund cemetery along with two other top Nazi officials. The townspeople demanded that the remains be removed, but the Volksbund said it couldn’t disinter them because they were buried in a mass grave. Only after four years of protests by the residents — and a refusal by officials to bury more remains there — were the names of the men removed from the “book of honor” at the cemetery’s visitor center in 1992. In 2002, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, objected before a Volksbund ceremony in Israel that honored Germans killed during army service, including SS officers; the event had to be postponed. The following year, the Volksbund proposed building a memorial for Germans near a cemetery in the Russian enclave Kaliningrad for victims of SS medical experiments. At one point, the bones of 4,300 German soldiers spent years sitting in a Czech factory that produced toilet bowls after a dispute with authorities who initially demanded that the Germans pay millions of dollars to bury them.
When I spoke about the controversies with David Livingstone, a historian at California Lutheran University who has researched the work of the Volksbund, he said that the group’s history may have something to do with how it behaves today. In West Germany, where the Volksbund was based, the task of purging former Nazis from their old positions stalled as the Cold War fight with the Soviets became Europe’s main concern. That allowed many former Nazis to find work at Volksbund, searching for their dead compatriots. Those men died long ago, Livingstone said, and the Volksbund was different today. “But the organizational culture is such that it’s been set by the people who were the founders in the 1950s and 1960s, specifically military veterans of the Third Reich,” he told me.
Livingstone told me about a personal tie to the search for the graves: In the early 2000s, he learned that his maternal grandfather was buried at the Volksbund cemetery in Costermano. According to a family legend, the grandfather, a sergeant, was killed in a mutiny by his own men when he wouldn’t abandon the Nazi cause, even after it was clear that the Germans had lost the war. Livingstone told me that he explained the situation to the Volksbund while researching a book about him and asked if it could give him all the documentation it had about how his grandfather’s body was found so that he might corroborate the story. “All of a sudden they started to get very evasive with me,” he said. “Long story short, they didn’t respond.” (The Volksbund told me that the exchange had been “extremely polite” but that their files “are internal working documents that the Volksbund cannot pass on.”)
Livingstone said there were limits to the Volksbund’s portrayal of the soldiers as casualties of the Nazi regime. “The narrative that they promote, from my research, is what I would call a ‘grand equivalency,’ that everybody was a victim. But you can’t put a Jewish victim that was torn from their home and a German citizen who was subjected to bombing by the Allies in the same category,” he said. “I think right now it’s really important to call this stuff out, because we’re sliding toward this illiberal if not authoritarian populist view of the world.”
One summer afternoon on a long car ride to Vienna with Dirk Reitz, the managing director of the Volksbund’s office in Dresden, I asked him what the rising tide of populism meant for his work. He took a second to answer. There was a debate over how the Volksbund should manage the interest of Germany’s far-right party, AfD, which had contacted Volksbund about hosting joint events. Reitz believed that as a nonpartisan organization, the Volksbund should try to engage with all the political parties in Germany.
But sometimes things didn’t go as planned, he said. Not long before, he and a colleague had been invited by an AfD supporter to make a presentation at an upcoming gathering. When they arrived, they found themselves in the middle of a battle re-enactment, like the ones done for the American Civil War. But this battle seemed to be from World War II, and some of the participants were wearing SS uniforms. The uniforms crossed a line for Reitz — he said he left the event immediately. Still, I asked him if he had ever confronted the AfD supporter about the uniforms. “We still have to have that conversation,” he told me.
Reitz kept driving through the flat landscape toward Vienna. Around sunset, the phone rang, and Reitz answered it, exchanging a few words with the caller before he hung up. I asked him who it was. “The man I told you about,” he said. “I told him now wasn’t a good time to talk.”
‘I fear this organization is at huge risk of being instrumentalized.’
— Markus Meckel, Volksbund president until 2016
Even if the Volksbund is cautious in its dealings with AfD members, Germany’s far-right party is vocal about its support for the group and its mission. On the AfD website, a petition by its leader, Alice Weidel, lists funding the group as one of its legislative priorities, along with establishing a “National Day for Unborn Life” and a plan to block Gazan refugees from entering Germany. Jan-Phillip Tadsen, an AfD state parliament member in Germany’s northeastern Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, told me that he is both a Volksbund donor and that he likes to lay wreaths at its ceremonies from the AfD.
The Volksbund does have supporters across the political spectrum: Several Volksbund officials I talked to said their biggest political patrons belonged to the Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s center-right party. One Green Party member I contacted told me she supported the group because it promoted peace and was opposed to far-right extremism.
Still, the possibility that far-right extremists could co-opt the Volksbund is a concern for some, including its former leadership. “I fear this organization is at huge risk of being instrumentalized,” Markus Meckel, the Volksbund’s president until 2016, told me when I met him in Berlin. Meckel, a former Protestant pastor, grew up in East Germany, where the Communist regime refused to build World War II memorials because they were seen as inherently pro-Nazi — an approach Meckel said he didn’t agree with because it sidestepped the hard questions of history. When he came to lead the Volksbund in 2013, however, he said he was startled by the group’s emphasis on commemoration. “There was this attitude there of ‘Our poor boys; look at what happened to them in the battlefield,’” he said. For an organization so concerned with the past, the Volksbund had seemed to sideline the mantra of “never again.”
Meckel decided he would undertake a reform project at the Volksbund. After having a look at the materials being distributed by the group, he found most of them to be inappropriate — for example, commemoration books for dead Wehrmacht soldiers that told about their lives but left out any information on the crimes German soldiers committed, or Christmas cards sent to families who had donated that told “sad stories from the western front.” The fliers the Volksbund distributed at its cemeteries focused mainly on the architecture. “But there was nothing about the war, nothing about why the soldiers were even there,” he said. Meckel ordered the publications to cease until they could be rewritten. Meckel also told me that the Volksbund staff almost exclusively focused on identifying the graves of German soldiers and ignored civilian remains.
Before long, the new president was looking into the Volksbund’s finances. One concern was that with each year, there were fewer war widows still alive to make contributions, and the organization’s income was declining. But equally troubling, Meckel said, was that some of the remaining donors had very questionable backgrounds. In one case, Meckel found that a large contributor was actually an organization that he suspected was founded by SS veterans. The group now sent money through a charitable foundation to obscure the funding’s Nazi ties, Meckel told me. “The question is: Who is sponsoring this?” he said.
(When I approached the Volksbund about the matter, it identified the group as the Mutual Aid Organization of Former Waffen-SS, a group that was known by its German initials, HIAG, and was eventually dissolved after numerous controversies. The Volksbund confirmed that HIAG’s assets had been transferred to a foundation it worked with afterward. But the Volksbund said the Waffen-SS group “saw itself as an aid organization” and for this reason was free to donate.)
His frustration mounting, Meckel sought to set the record straight with a mission statement — a move that he hoped would be a first step to build momentum for bigger proposals. It turned out it would be Meckel’s last crusade at the Volksbund. His proposal sought to clarify the group’s stance on World War II, calling it a “racist war of extermination,” a standard description approved years before by the German Parliament that placed the blame for the conflict squarely on Germany. But many in the Volksbund’s rank and file balked. A group of reservists led the charge against Meckel, with one former general writing an article that called his proposal “downright nonsense” and dismissed the idea that the war was an extermination campaign as a “historical theory that requires factual proof.” Sometime in 2016, Meckel determined that his opponents had the votes to remove him and resigned. (In its statement, the Volksbund said Meckel had “fallen out” with the organization because he had “ignored decision-making processes within the association and did not involve the committees in his decisions, instead acting autonomously. This caused resentment within the association.”)
After Meckel went public about the resistance against his reforms, the Volksbund eventually approved “war of extermination” language similar to what Meckel was pushing for, though only after he was gone. Meckel told me he was shocked that it even had to be debated so many years after the war. But he was also skeptical that the wording made a difference in the end. “They might have approved their mission statement, but they didn’t change their behavior,” he told me. “How do we mourn and remember these soldiers without honoring them?”
The bones exhumed from the Van Beuningens’ garden in Wroclaw were set to be reburied, on a rainy September day, at a Volksbund cemetery on the outskirts of the city. To the 128 bodies, the Volksbund had added an additional 178 remains, mainly Nazi soldiers it found at other sites around the city. A total of 306 people would be interred that day, I was told, in a military-style ceremony that would include a trumpeter and a chaplain.
The Volksbund had also searched for relatives to attend but found only one who was alive. Still, that did not stop a crowd from coming to the services that afternoon: As I arrived, dozens of Germans filed out of rented buses, Volksbund rank and file who traveled more than three hours from towns in the conservative states Saxony and Thuringia. One group had brought a wreath with the logo of a group called Landsmannschaft Schlesien to Poland. The group, I learned afterward, was a so-called German homeland association that represented descendants of those expelled from that part of Poland after the Nazi regime’s fall. In recent years, its youth wing was expelled for having ties to a neo-Nazi political party.
Below us in the pits sat the remains to be buried. Each set of bones had been fitted into a tiny black coffin about two feet long, which in turn had been arranged in neat rows on the ground, each with a sprig of fir on top. They were divided between two massive pits, one for soldiers and the other for civilians — roughly half in each group.
I asked if I could meet the relative the researchers had located and was soon introduced to Irmgard Aust, whose grandfather, Gustav Hiller, was killed during the war’s last year at 61. Aust told me she was a Volksbund member herself; she had first seen them as a child in Bavaria where they collected donations in tin cans. When it called her, she thought it was after another contribution — instead, it said it had found her grandfather’s remains behind the villa. “I started crying,” she told me. “I got emotional.” Aust showed me a sepia portrait of Hiller, who looked out with sunken eyes, a middle-aged man who had already lived through one world war. Hiller didn’t fight for the Nazis, Aust said, but the regime trusted him with leading food distribution as Breslau fought on. Finally, in April 1945, Hiller was killed in an air raid.
Aust’s husband, Gotti, began to show more pictures, but at one point his wife asked him to stop. Gotti closed the photo album and looked up from it with a polite smile — it seemed we had reached something the couple didn’t want to be seen. I asked Aust what was in the last photos. She wouldn’t say.
Maybe it is harder for families to carry stories of guilt than for nations.
Someone rang a bell signaling the beginning of the ceremony. A sprinkle of rain began to fall, and various officials took to the lectern, speaking about the war in Poland and the need for Germans to acknowledge their responsibility for their crimes. They spoke about Germany’s campaigns of extermination against minorities. In the crowd of Germans, I was one of few foreigners there that day — no Polish representatives spoke at the ceremony taking place in their country, even though some were invited.
And it was perhaps because of this environment that a new theme emerged — not guilt, but grief. Many said that despite the devastation that was inflicted by Germany, their families had been victims too and wanted closure of their own from the war. One spoke of a relative who died on Christmas Day in 1941. The military deacon told the story of his grandmother, who did not know whether to declare her husband dead after he went missing while fighting in Russia. “When we remember the dead in front of God, we don’t think about a mass of people — we think about single people: a name, a home, a family,” he said. “God of peace, we ask you for the people we have buried here today. We only know a few by name, but we trust for you they are not a number, but your children.”
There was a moment of silence as the trumpeter played. Later, men with shovels came and buried the 306 bodies for the second time.
The following month, I sat down with Backen, a former brigadier general who now serves as the Volksbund’s chief executive. There was something strange about the funeral to me, not just to see the ceremony done with military honors but to see Germans grieving as much for themselves as for their victims. I knew this was the natural response when people bury their dead; at the same time, it all seemed to break with some unspoken prohibition about how to remember these particular combatants. Certainly there was an acknowledgment at the funeral of the national guilt Germany still faced. But when it came to the responsibility of the family members who chose their path during the Nazi years — those “single people” in the words of the chaplain — “never again” was replaced by recollections like those Aust had for her grandfather about their positive individual qualities instead of their monstrous collective crime. Maybe it is harder for families to carry stories of guilt than for nations.
I asked Backen what other taboos might be changing in his country. Its distrust of the military was one, he said. “When I was a young soldier, walking down the streets of Hamburg, someone might spit on you, right at the bottom of your feet when he crossed your path,” he said. Now things were changing: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was showing that German attitudes about pacifism needed to be reconsidered. “It will not protect you from someone who intends to do you harm,” he said.
None of this was to excuse Germany’s past war crimes, he said. The Nazi regime destroyed its own country along with much of Europe. Among the dead that the Volksbund exhumed were not just drivers and cooks but also true mass murderers. Still, the question of guilt was a complicated one. Backen said many of those who were buried were only 19 when they died. “Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, people say, ‘They should have done this’ and ‘They should have done that.’ I often ask myself: What would I have done if I was in that position?”
He told me a story about his grandfather, who fought with the Wehrmacht only to be sent to a prisoner camp after Hitler’s defeat, where he faced abuse at Soviet hands before returning home. As a young boy in postwar Germany, Backen said he once came across his grandfather and great-uncle, both former soldiers, in the garden drinking coffee. The two men were in tears. “You don’t understand as a boy, but later as you grow older and mature, you start to understand why they were crying,” he said. “But my children? There are no experiences like this anymore.”
I remembered an email exchange I had with Serge Klarsfeld, an 89-year-old former Nazi hunter living in France who joined the protest over the graveyard of Anne Frank’s persecutor in the Netherlands. Klarsfeld’s family experience of the war was far different from Backen’s — his father was murdered at Auschwitz — and he now seemed frustrated that the graves issue was still up for debate so many years later. To him, the matter had been simple: “We protested because it was known that the German graves in that cemetery, in a country occupied by the German Army during the war, were mostly SS graves,” he wrote to me.
Backen did not see the matter of the graves as so black and white. “How do we judge someone today, who we probably can assume has done wrong in his life and has committed a crime? He was never given a trial. He never had the chance to defend himself, because he died,” Backen said.
For Backen, there seemed to be more room to discuss, more room for nuance and subtlety, when it came to the remains and to whom they belonged.
“I’m someone who has really no desire to see them as heroes,” Backen said of the Nazi bones the Volksbund exhumed. “But imagine them, even those who are perpetrators: Imagine them in your mind as maybe an 8-year-old boy standing in front of a Christmas tree — with, with shiny eyes and. … ” There was a pause. “Was he born as a monster? A perpetrator? No. He was made into that by someone.”
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