Somewhere South of Berlin

In May 1945 in a small town south of Berlin, soldiers of the German 9th Army gambled everything to attempt an almost-hopeless break out of the Russian encirclement, desperate to reach the Americans.  Forty thousand of them were  slaughtered. The vast majority did not even get any burial at all, but were left to rot in the woods where they fell.  The wounded bled to death at their sides, mixed with a terrible number of civilians fleeing the advancing Russians.

Today I went south alone, to a quiet forest cemetery started by a pastor who had served as a clergyman in the Wehrmacht. Originally after the war he was assigned to a church in the Harz mountains, but when he discovered what had happened here, he asked to be transferred. After four years he was granted his wish.  He spent the rest of his life, with his wife and some of the local community, finding and burying German soldiers and civilians until his death in 1986. But the work goes on.

Despite hostility from the authorities in East German times, the people here have been able to bury over 20,000 lost souls. They were able to identify only 8,000 of them. The rest have had their names and identities erased by time and souvenir hunters who have taken their identification tags.  Most of my friends in Berlin have never heard of the place, and it’s only through the grace of British author Tony LeTissier that I learned of it.

It’s a beautiful place this time of year, with sunlight softly falling through the pine trees, and the needles and sandy earth making a soft and inviting bower. It felt welcoming and natural to sit for a while on the ground in the middle of some of the graves and just be with these young men. I stayed quite some time enjoying the friendly and peaceful atmosphere.

Panzer Regiment 5 Stone

Then I went on to a Garrison Museum where part of my friend Charley’s regiment trained for their North Africa assignment. It felt like a miracle that I know some of the veterans, American and German, who survived and stand testament to what happened when they were young men in an immense struggle that took many of their friends and families.