Photo: Czech radio
Even eight decades after the end of World War II, Ukrainian soldiers continue to find the remains of fallen German soldiers on the territory of Ukraine. This was reported by the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung with reference to Wolfgang Schneidergan, head of the German War Graves Association.
According to him, in 2023, about 1,700 remains of German soldiers were found in Ukraine alone, mostly in areas where there are no hostilities. Most of these finds were recorded in the central and western regions of the country.
Particularly tragic are the cases when Ukrainian soldiers digging trenches on the frontline of the current war with Russia come across the remains of German soldiers who died on the same land during the Second World War.
According to Volodymyr Yoseliani, a representative of the VDK organisation in Ukraine, one such incident occurred in the spring of 2022 in Vyshhorod near Kyiv, just as the Russian army was attempting to capture the Ukrainian capital. The Ukrainian military, while setting up defensive positions, found the remains of two Wehrmacht soldiers and their insignia.
Search operations at the sites of active hostilities have been suspended due to the danger to personnel. However, the exhumation of remains continues in western and central Ukraine. In 2022, 816 remains of German soldiers were found in Ukraine, and in 2023, almost twice as many.
In total, the German War Graves Association estimates that the remains of about 2 million German soldiers, many of whom died in combat or in Soviet captivity, remain unidentified in Eastern Europe.
The German War Graves Association has been operating since 1919. Currently, the organisation looks after more than 800 military cemeteries in 45 countries, where about 2.8 million fallen soldiers are buried. The work on search and reburial continues today, as the organisation receives up to 20,000 requests from relatives of those who went missing during the Second World War every year.
