[SimoneFlen']

Posted 9th April 2021

They died for the sake of your future

In the Zelenograd district of the Kaliningrad region, the search engines of ROOPKO "Conscience" recently found another burial place of Soviet soldiers.

“Carrying out prospecting work along the highway near the village of Medvedevo (the German name of Norgau), in one of the sections, bones were found with probes at a depth of half a meter,” the search engines said.

In the grave there were 10 people stacked on top of each other, mostly young people from 18 to 25 years old. Most of them died from the received shrapnel wounds.

“Medical tourniquets were placed on the hips and legs of two of the victims. Uniform buttons with stars, metal buckles from canvas and leather belts, and the cover of probably a Red Army book have survived. Judging by the Orthodox crosses on the wearer, three soldiers were believers. Another warrior kept the royal pennies with him. Someone carried a penknife in their pocket, ”added Ruslan Khisamov, head of the search unit.

According to the data from the archive, the Red Army soldiers were killed on April 14, 1945 during the liberation of the village from the Nazi invaders.

[imbok]

War really is hell.

[William May]

These excavations are very common, throughout Europe. Germany has been finding, identifying, and returning 10,000 German troops per year, on average. These excavations are commonly done by high school and university students, on their summer break, with historians and officials directing the work. Especially the Russians, as they did a very poor job with their dead, so now students are doing this as a memorial and to try and find all the lost soldiers. There are a lot of videos of these young people's work on You tube. The Russians just piled their dead in a hole, and forgot about them. They didn't even get markers.
German troops are easier to identify, as they all had a metal ID disc, and it went into the grave with them. I don't know if the Russians had dog tags like the U.S. or not. The German ID tag was an oval, scored down the middle. One half went into the grave, and the other was turned into headquarters for record-keeping.

[Berserk]

There has been a problem tough with German Name tag's.
Some of them where made of bakaliet, a non rusting substance, while others where cheaple stamped out sheet metal ones. Totally rusted away in many cases

[v1r]

Originally Posted by William May ↗

These excavations are very common, throughout Europe. Germany has been finding, identifying, and returning 10,000 German troops per year, on average. These excavations are commonly done by high school and university students, on their summer break, with historians and officials directing the work. Especially the Russians, as they did a very poor job with their dead, so now students are doing this as a memorial and to try and find all the lost soldiers. There are a lot of videos of these young people's work on You tube. The Russians just piled their dead in a hole, and forgot about them. They didn't even get markers.
German troops are easier to identify, as they all had a metal ID disc, and it went into the grave with them. I don't know if the Russians had dog tags like the U.S. or not. The German ID tag was an oval, scored down the middle. One half went into the grave, and the other was turned into headquarters for record-keeping.

do you have a source on this? would like to read further.

[William May]

Originally Posted by v1r ↗

do you have a source on this? would like to read further.

Check on Youtube, for such videos as "Exhumation of 25 soldiers from German Field Hospital Cemetery"
or "She knew that 7 German Soldiers were buried in her yard"
There are 10 videos at least of high school and college age Russian students doing such excavations, but I can't find them right now. I will look further, because I KNOW I saw them on Youtube. I was quite touched by their hard work dealing with German and Soviet dead. Their goals are to find as many missing as possible, identify them if possible, and get them back to their families.
Once you start with these, others will pop up. I wish there was a place to donate funds to support these efforts, as I would certainly contribute to them.
The reason I know about the German metal oval tags is that I still have my father's tag. He was a POW of the Germans, and brought his tag back with him after the war, and described how they were used. He was captured on Feb 7th, 1945, on the border between Holland and Germany.

[v1r]

Originally Posted by William May ↗

Check on Youtube, for such videos as "Exhumation of 25 soldiers from German Field Hospital Cemetery"
or "She knew that 7 German Soldiers were buried in her yard"
There are 10 videos at least of high school and college age Russian students doing such excavations, but I can't find them right now. I will look further, because I KNOW I saw them on Youtube. I was quite touched by their hard work dealing with German and Soviet dead. Their goals are to find as many missing as possible, identify them if possible, and get them back to their families.
Once you start with these, others will pop up. I wish there was a place to donate funds to support these efforts, as I would certainly contribute to them.
The reason I know about the German metal oval tags is that I still have my father's tag. He was a POW of the Germans, and brought his tag back with him after the war, and described how they were used. He was captured on Feb 7th, 1945, on the border between Holland and Germany.

Much appreciated i should be able to find a rabbithole from those! Thank you for sharing

[William May]

Originally Posted by Berserk ↗

There has been a problem tough with German Name tag's.
Some of them where made of bakaliet, a non rusting substance, while others where cheaple stamped out sheet metal ones. Totally rusted away in many cases

Well, the one my father was issued as a POW in Germany was made of aluminum. There were no shortages of aluminum in Germany, as the Boeing Aircraft Co. of Seattle was delivering 400,000 lbs of aluminum per month, in the form of shot down B-17's.
They should have made them out of stainless, but there was NO stainless steel available in Germany except for the highest priority war projects, such as the development of jet engines for fighter aircraft.
The aluminum tags held up pretty well. I was surprised at their good condition (Still legible) after being buried with dead bodies for nearly 70 years.
The Germans started restricting the use of "strategic materials" in 1938, trying to replace any materials that were not available in Germany and had to be imported, with other materials that Germany had good sources of. This was a requirement of all civilian industries.