German officials said on Tuesday they had found the skeletal remains of 1,080 Wehrmachtand 700 Red Army soldiers at the Seelow Heights battlefield since they began searching 12years ago for victims of the fiercest World War Two combat in Germany. Posted on 04/05/2005 8:13:19 PM PDT by M. Espinola
SEELOW HEIGHTS, Germany (Reuters) - The remains of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers killed in a climactic World War Two battle outside Berlin are still being unearthed and identified 60 years after the fighting ended.
German officials said on Tuesday they had found the skeletal remains of 1,080 Wehrmachtand 700 Red Army soldiers at the Seelow Heights battlefield since they began searching 12years ago for victims of the fiercest World War Two combat in Germany.
"World War Two won't be truly finished until they've all been recovered and given a properburial," said Erwin Kowalke, head of a group that cares for German war graves. Communist East Germany distanced itself from Hitler's Germany and for ideological reasons did not retrieve thedead soldiers.
"No one knows for sure how many are still out there, but I'd say there are still 10,000 -- about 3,000 Germans and twice as many Soviets," he told a group of journalists ahead of an April 16th memorial marking the 60th anniversary of the Seelow battle.
An estimated 50,000 soldiers were killed in three days of heavy fighting for Seelow, a village ofjust 5,000.
A 908,000-strong Red Army force supported by 3,100 tanks opened its assault on Berlin atSeelow Heights, 70 km (45 miles) east of the capital, before dawn on April 16, 1945. But they met ferocious resistance from the 129,000 Wehrmacht soldiers.
Although greatly outnumbered and forced to rely on inexperienced teenagers and pensionersas reinforcements, the Germans held their lines on the 50-metre high slopes east of Seelow fordays before being overrun by waves of Soviet forces.
An estimated 38,000 Soviet and Polish soldiers fell taking Seelow, important only because itlies on a bluff overlooking the Oder River on the main road to Berlin. About 12,000 German soldiers were killed defending the small town.
LAST DEFENCE BEFORE BERLIN
"As unfathomable as it may seem now, the German soldiers truly believed they would still win the war and were highly motivated to defend their folk, the fatherland and Fuehrer," said Gerd-Ulrich Hermann, head of the Seelow memorial museum.
"They knew they were the last line of defence before Berlin. They didn't run away. They fought until there was nothing left."
Looking out from Seelow across the flat marshland that stretches east 17 km (11 miles) to the Oder River, Herrmann said there were many more fallen soldiers who were thrown into pits,hastily buried in shallow graves, covered by battle debris, or simply disappeared in the swampyvegetation after the war.
"That is probably one of the biggest soldiers' cemeteries in the world," he said, pointing to the Oder plain. "Where are all the soldiers who were at the battle but still unaccounted for?"
Communist East Germany lacked interest in retrieving the bones, but after reunification in 1990 the local state of Brandenburg launched formal operations to recover dead soldiers from botharmies as well as dangerous unexploded munitions.
With the help of farmers, hikers and construction workers they clear 800 tonnes of munitionseach year.
Graves in Seelow
But there is clearly a priority on finding the unmarked graves of fathers, brothers and sonswhose fate remains a mystery to relatives all across Germany. Even Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder recently learned exactly where in Romania his father, a Wehrmacht soldier, was killed.
"It feels good every time I'm able to identify one," said Kowalke, 63. "But it's deeply unsatisfying when I'm not able to find any means of identifying them."
Roughly 70 percent of the remains found are German soldiers and he finds identity tags on ornear about half of them. But Soviet soldiers only rarely had ID tags, making identification much harder. Sometimes, however, Soviet soldiers can be traced through medals, with numbers on them, found near the graves.
"It's always moving when family members are here for the reburials," said Herrmann. "The children or wives of men who've been lost for decades always say how thankful they are to finally know what happened to their loved ones."
Graphics added
Too interesting!
Got to give it to the Ruskies... they gave a lot in WWII
Interesting article. I hadn't heard about this battle.
The battles between the Russians and Germans were well-known for their ferocity and this one was no exception.
Such a waste of a great military fighting machine.
"Got to give it to the Ruskies... they gave a lot in WWII"
...and most of it was thrown away by brutal Soviet leadership and bureaucratic bungling.
I once knew a former Russian Colonel that openly talked of shooting troops if they didn't throw themselves at the Germans - especially Asiatics. Look at the casualty numbers above; the Germans - vastly outnumbered - killed far more Russians than simple parity would suggest. Consider, too, that the Germans were scraping the bottom of the barrel by that time and nearly out of all war material. Thank God the Germans didn't have anything near parity with that Allies.
here's a more detailed version of this battle :
http://zhukov.mitsi.com/Seelow.htm
The battles between the Russians and Germans were well-known for their ferocity and this one was no exception.
No love lost between these two. No two opponents every hated each other so supremely. Not sure just why. Idealogically they were not that much different, they both were socialists. So why such bitterness?
I meant the people, not the leadership..
..they were mirror images of each other, Stalin (1923-1953) and Hitler (1933-1945). Only Stalin was in power for a longer period of time.
I think on the Russian side it was revenge for the German invasion of their country. By the time the Russians entered Germany, the Germans were fighting to prevent their homeland from being overrun, their women raped, and themselves and their children being made slaves to foreigners; in short, to prevent that revenge. Ideology had little to do with it.
The battle of Seelow Heights is considered the last great battle of World War two on the Eastern Front. Losses were horrific.
Very interesting story. Of all the globalist crap Roosevelt engineered to our eternal regret, letting the commies take the plum of Berlin was right up there at the top. Frankly, what the Russians suffered was largely a result of their own making since they were already crippled by the paranoid liquidation of their capable officer corps by Stalin and his eternal political machinations and, secondly, whatever losses they had during WWII (~20 M) barely eclipsed what the commie SOB's did prior to the war in pogroms and mass murder campaigns of their own.
In any event, I think you'll agree that there is nothing like first-hand accounts. I always want their perceptions and experiences about the times, culture and people of the age. I don't think that most of them had anymore idea about the actual political workings behind the scenes than most people do today, but they sure as hell can describe what life was like more accurately than post-modern revisionist pinko diversity types. In feeding my interests, I think I sometimes pester the oldsters I know to death, er, well, not quite that far - you know what I mean.
|
|
|
| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
|
|
Thanks M. Espinola. |
|
|
|
|
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
