At Germany’s biggest WWII battle site, a changing view

SEELOW, Germany — In the best mellow spirit of modern Germany, authorities in Seelow wanted to build a bike path so the increasing number of tourists could expand their rides across the tranquil flat plain of the Oder River and into neighboring Poland.

This being the site of the biggest World War II battle on German soil, a team was chosen to scour the proposed bike path route for abandoned ordnance. Soon they turned up not munitions, but a mass grave, with the remains of as many as 28 Soviet soldiers.

The finding, in May, confirmed once more the bloodsoaked nature of the Oder plain, where tens of thousands of soldiers on the Soviet and Nazi sides perished in the April 1945 battle for the Seelow Heights. The rocky outcrop rises just 100 meters above the plain, but gave some 80,000 Germans sufficient cover to dig in and slaughter many of the up to 1 million Soviet troops sent in waves to overwhelm the enemy and clear the way to Berlin.

This history has never ceased to leave its mark, making Seelow a showcase for that unfailing truth of war: To the victors go the spoils, especially the chance to impose their version of events.

After the Allies crushed Hitler, Seelow Heights became a showcase for Stalin. Two Soviet sculptors, Lev Kerbel and Vladimir Zigal, created a bronze statue of a Red Army soldier, gazing mournfully toward his homeland, said the monument’s director, Kerstin Niebsch.

The figure conveys a “more in sorrow than anger” mood while leaving no doubt of superiority — moral and military — as it towers over the land of vanquished Nazi Germany. Below the statue and the cliff where it is mounted stand the neat graves of 66 fallen Soviet soldiers, as young as 19, with headstones bearing black stars, not the usual communist red.

It is a powerful sight, bordered by trees and a stunning view of the plain where these men met their deaths. As Niebsch noted, it is a spot that shows just how worthless human life can become. “Even really hardened men,” like a recent group of officers from Georgia, the former Soviet republic, “swallow hard.”

Next in the palpable layers of history to peel back here comes the East German period, 1972 to

GORDON WELTERS / THE NEW YORK TIMES Günter Debski , who was at Seelow Heights, the biggest World War II battle on German soil, examines mementos including his Wehrmacht payroll book, earlier this month at his home in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany. Debski, who still has a piece of shrapnel...