Figure 1.--This is a Luftwaffe funeral in December 1939 during the Phoney War. It seems to involve only the parents, two soldiers, and a two-man Hitler Youth honor guard. We are not sure how common such small funerals were and if there were regulations about funerals. The two soldiers are probably a military officer and a comrad. Almost all were conducted without the bodies of their loved ones. That may be a church in the backgrounds. He seems to have a rather elaborate gravesite. This ceased to be case after the invasion od the Soviet Union and most of the casualties occurred far from the Reich.

We do not have detailed information on what happened to the bodies of German soldier killed in World War II. Our primary interest here is the funerals held in Germany for fallen soldiers. As far as we can tell, there were very few such funerals. Some services my have been held without the soldier's body. We notice funerals using altar boys despite the campaihn the NAZIs launched against the Church. Hitler allowed the Churches to continue operaring during the War, but he was planning to replace them after the War with a new state religion. More common was using Hitler Youth boys at the funrals. An almost mandatory feaure at a German military funeral was singing Ludwig Uhland's song 'Ich hatt einen Kameraden'. A major factor here is that there were was no way of returning soldiers killed in action to Germany. Germany had limited air transport and far greater demands on it that the Luftwaffe could begin to supply. Even rail transport was not an option given that refigeration was required. Thus moist of the fallen were burried near they were killed. We are not sure about the early campaigns in Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France which bordered Germany. But after the battle grounds moved further from Germany, the families were simply informed that their sons or fathers had been killed or were missing through the mail. Most of the Germans killed in the War were killed in what was at the time the Soviet Union, some 90 percent of the casulties were sustained there or in the camapigns as the Red Army driove into the Reich. The Germans did set up temporry cemetries. When the War began to go against Grmany and they began to retreat, the Germans themselves often destroyed the markers of their own dead, afraid that the graves might be desacrated and not wanting the Soviets to know the extent of their casualties. Understandably the advancing Red Army had no interest in German war dead and there were no individual burials other than rustic graves for sanitary purposes. Thus there are German graves, both individual and mass pits all over the Western Soviet Union along a battlefiekd streaching 1,000 miles nort tho south. They are still being discovered. Altogether some 2.7 million German soldiers and 1.4 million civilans are believed to have perishied there. After the War, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (VDK) took on the massive job of establishing military cemetaries for the fallen. [Crossland] Their work was of course complicated by the Cold War and the hatred toward the Germans as a result of the mssive attrocities committed. Interestingly, the Soviets also gave little attention to indvidual graves for their own fallen. While they erected massive monuments, they were often surrounded mostly by mass graves. In the West, the Allies after the D-Day landings and drive toward the Reich did collect and bury the German war dead. There are German cemetaries in both the former Soviet Union and the West. We think the Soviet cemmetaries are mostly those estanlished by the Germans before they were driven back by the Red Army. These cemetaries outside of Germany are also cared for by the VDK.

Sources

Crossland, David. "Cemetery in Russia: Germany Still Burying Eastern Front Dead," Spiegel Online International (July 31, 2013).

Created: 6:00 AM 1/4/2015
Last updated: 9:18 PM 3/7/2024