Pierre Grande Guerre
New member
I doubted for a long time, if I would post this topic here in Pickelhaubes. After discussing this topic with some Dutch friends, I decided, that it still might be interesting for some members of the forum.
The forces of nature, like frost and defrost, still causes a lot of findings on the battlefield. Every year tons and tons of ammunition and explosives is still being cleared from the former battlefields. For instance, only in the front sectors of Ypres and the Yser River in Belgium the Belgian Explosions Demolition Service collected in the year 2009 200 tons of explosives!
In Pheasant Wood near Fromelles in the Artois France, the human remains of about 250 Australian soldiers were detected and reburied in 2009. Click HERE .
The international media spend a lot of attention in 2009 about these facts. Which is, of course, good!
But if the human remains of German soldiers are detected or found, there is hardly any news, only perhaps in some local papers, even not yet in 2009!
On 23 August 2008 some French local researchers detected the human remains of 35 German soldiers in “Minenwerferunsterstand IV” , at the northern edge of the central crater of the by mine warfare destructed village of Vauquois, Argonne, France. Click HERE for images of Vauquois. They were killed during the fights in March 1915.
After a long and careful process five of these soldiers have been identified. One of the was Xaver Hermannutz, who is identified with his personal “Klapdeckuhr”, a pocket watch with chain, with his name and birthday in scripted. Family members of him, with a great resemblance to their Great Uncle, were attending the official burial service of all 35 German soldiers on 13 November 2009 at the Deutscher Kriegskräberstatte of Cheppy.
Click HERE for pictures of this solemn service at Cheppy.
I got this news from a well informed, Dutch Verdun expert, a friend of mine, who did sent me an elaborate article about the excavations and the historical background in French.
If you are interested in more details I will translate some fragments of the texts and post some pictures of the findings and situation sketches.
To my opinion after 90 years and after the the decades of European reconciliation the (re-)burials of all soldiers deserve also the same amount of attention of the media as the allied soldiers deserve.
My contribution might perhaps not fit in this forum, forgive me then, but I hope it corrects this image in a more just way.
Pierre
