Czech town of Cheb will expand its graveyard to take in German bodies
Unfinished business: that is the only way to describe the tens of thousands of German corpses rotting in distant fields of Eastern Europe. There are conflicting estimates over the number of German military war dead. German historian Wolfram Wette calculates that about 5.3 million German soldiers lost their lives in the Second World War.” Out of that number about 2.6 million were killed in the last phase between July 1944 and May 1945.” The Red Army was moving up fast from the east, rushing for Berlin, eager to establish a military presence in a huge swathe of Eastern Europe.
There was no time for the Germans to bury the dead as one defensive line after another crumbled. And after the war there was no great incentive to dig holes or to carve crosses for the remnants of an army that had been part of Hitler’s oppressive machine. So their coal-scuttle helmets, mangled weapons and badges were plundered by local teenagers and they were left to decay in woods, under bracken or crunched up by digger trucks as they moved in to build high rise blocks for the new communist societies.