today’s ” AR-online” again AR-Online recent issues: May 1999 April 1999 March 1999 February 1999 January 1999 December 1998 November 1998 October 1998 September 1998 London, May 14, 1999 Picket protest over cemetery for war dead from ALAN HALL in Berlin THE OPENING of a cemetery tomorrow will be seen by many as an affront to 22 million[ * ] soldiers and civilians who died resisting Hitler’s might.
The cemetery in Russia is the first honouring German troops who died at Stalingrad in the greatest single battle of the Second World War.The graveyard contains the remains of 21,001 fallen Germans, but 56 years have done little to ease the pain for Russia of the enormous losses it sustained in the Great Patriotic War. The slaughter of the German 6th Army under General Friedrich Paulus between the end of 1942 and January 1943 was the turning point of the war.
Two hundred thousand Germans died at Stalingrad, and a further 90,000 PoWs captured there died in Stalin’s labour camps. Hitler’s army lost a quarter of its tanks, artillery and supplies. For years the remains of the German dead remained stacked in barns and sheds around the battlefield, rotting with their Wehrmacht uniforms still on them. No-one would bury them, let alone honour them.
Years of intense negotiations between old soldiers’ organisations, backed by Bonn, did little to thaw the hearts of Soviet politicians. Even when Stalin died and the city was renamed Volgagrad, the same refusal to honour the war dead was relayed time and again