In a piece with no clear answers, Nicholas Casey explores whether the rediscovered remains of fallen Nazi soldiers should be reburied in cemeteries. It’s a fraught topic, particularly at a time when the far right is rising in Europe and around the world. The group searching for these remains, the Volksbud, make some incredible discoveries (including 128 soldiers in someone’s garden), but their history—and future—is mired in controversy.
There were old rusted objects like keys and earrings. A pince-nez. A gold wedding ring. A large chain, and on it a medallion inscribed with the name of Wilhelm Korn. When someone lifted the remains of a Wehrmacht soldier, a doll fell onto the ground, perhaps belonging to the dead man’s daughter. The workers carefully accumulated bones, then sent them away in labeled crates. Where the Van Beuningens had pictured a garden, or maybe a swimming pool, there was now only a series of mounds. The final body count was staggering: 128 people.
Staggering but — at least for the Volksbund — not exactly surprising. Europe, in some ways, is a vast cemetery, littered with the remains of two world wars that killed, by conservative estimates, some 56.5 million people. Many simply vanished into the rubble, while others were hastily buried in unmarked graves. As countries rebuilt after the war, most of these killing fields were simply paved over as Europeans sought to turn a new page — leaving the daunting task of finding the dead for future generations. Many countries around the world have an organization like the Volksbund, but nowhere is this work more fraught than in Germany, where memory and forgetting are constantly bound up in a struggle to confront — or avoid — a guilt that was so vast that many references to the country’s nationalist past remain taboo even today.
More picks on the Third Reich
Don’t Close Your Teeth
“Cynthia Zarin traces the rise of fascism through the diary entries of Virginia Woolf.”
The Nazi of Oak Park
“It was a stunning revelation: A respected high school custodian had been a concentration camp guard. This excerpt of a new book examines how the disclosure of a dark secret in the early ’80s divided a suburb.”
As a Former IDF Soldier and Historian of Genocide, I Was Deeply Disturbed by My Recent Visit to Israel
“This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history—and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree.”
The Drawing the Art Institute Won’t Give Back
“The heirs of a famous Jewish entertainer killed in the Holocaust want the museum to return a work they say was stolen by the Nazis. But was it really?”
How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust?
“With ‘The Zone of Interest,’ Jonathan Glazer is just the latest director to confront the problem.”
How Sandra Hüller Approached Playing a Nazi
“The German actress probes characters with unusual depth. But to portray a Fascist wife, in ‘The Zone of Interest,’ she reversed her usual approach—and withheld her empathy.”
