75 years after WWII, search on for missing soldiers

Volunteers excavate long-buried trench lines to look for those who failed to go home

Klessin (Germany), May 5: Thomas Siepert looks across the verdant grain field, glowing in the sun after a spring thunderstorm, as windmills slowly churn in the distance. Wild boar piglets trundle across the road into town and a hare pops out and dashes away.

Yet the serene scene belies the slaughter there 75 years ago as German troops fought furiously — and futilely — to stave off the Soviet Red Army that was approaching the Nazi capital. “It seems so idyllic, but it’s a huge cemetery,” Siepert said. “That shouldn’t be forgotten.” But for decades, many of those who died there were forgotten, some buried where they fell and others dragged by civilians in the months after the war into trenches and foxholes they had themselves dug, and covered over. For the last 15 years, volunteers like Siepert from around Europe have been trying to rectify that, devoting vacations to excavating long-buried trench lines and military positions in the search for those who never made it home.

During 19 digs across a square kilometre, members of the Association for the Recovery of the Fallen in Eastern Europe have found 116 German and 129 Soviet soldiers. They seek to identify as many as possible — to provide closure for families, to give the dead their names back, and to separate them from the numbers in the history books in the hope of explaining the cost of war to future generations.

“On all sides, these are destroyed lives. These are all people who died senselessly,” said Albrecht Laue, chairman of the association. “If we talk about a huge slaughter with hundreds of thousands of dead, nobody can understand that. But if I talk about the story of a young 17-yearold soldier, that's tangible.” Laue, a 46-year-old businessman from Hamburg, got interested in the search when looking for the grave of his grandfather, which he located near where he died fighting in Russia in 1942 as a young lieutenant. Siepert, 47, an engineer from nearby Frankfurt an der Oder, remembers as a child having regular lectures in school about avoiding the grenades and other munitions still found in the area, and wondering why. Other volunteers include anthropologists, archaeologists, excavators and the disposal experts needed when munitions are found. They hail from all over, including Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands. “We couldn’t, and also don’t, want to look for soldiers from a specific nation,” Laue said.

“That’s the interesting thing when one finds one of the dead; one never even knows at the beginning if it’s a German or a Soviet.” In February 1945, they were bitter foes. The village of Klessin sits on a height 2 kilometres from the Oder River.

German military observers used it to call in artillery strikes on Soviet troops as they streamed across a pontoon bridge in the build-up before the final push on Berlin. Recognising the strategic importance of the hamlet, 100 kilometres east of Berlin, the

Soviets made it a target.

The Nazis resolved to hold it, moving in a unit of soldiers, augmented by officer cadets and older “Volkssturm” militia, scraped up as the number of military-aged men dwindled.

The fighting pitted 400 Germans in Klessin against about four times the Soviets, with the Germans backed by a unit of Panther tanks in the neighbouring village of Podelzig, nearby artillery and air-dropped supplies. Exactly how many were killed or listed as missing is not known, but casualties were enormous, Siepert said.

DURING 19 digs across a square kilometre, members of the Association for the Recovery of the Fallen in Eastern Europe have found 116 German and 129 Soviet soldiers.