When Daniel and Victoria Van Beuningen first toured their future home, a quiet villa in the Polish city of Wroclaw, it had been abandoned for years, its windows sealed up with bricks. But something about its overgrown garden spoke to them. They could imagine raising chickens there, planting tomatoes and cucumbers. They could make something beautiful out of it, they thought — a place where their children could run and play.They moved in knowing very little about what happened at the villa before World War II, when Wroclaw, formerly Breslau, was still part of Germany.The couple wanted to know more, and their inquiries eventually led to the Meinecke family in Heidelberg, Germany, elderly siblings who said they were born in the home. Over a long afternoon, they showed the couple pictures of the place from happier times before the war, but they also offered the Van Beuningens a surprising warning: The couple might find the remains of some German soldiers buried in the garden. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What historical context is discussed regarding Europe?
When you think of Europe, you probably think of a museum you went to on vacation or a beautiful bridge that you crossed on the Seine. You probably don't think of it as a place where you're stepping over killing fields. And yet, that's also what Europe is. It's a vast cemetery. Think of all the wars that have taken place, the last two world wars being the most devastating.
those wars left the bones of millions of people scattered across the continent. Today, tens of thousands of bodies are still being discovered in Europe every year. They're being found in people's backyards when they plant a garden, by excavators digging out basements, and alongside freeways. It's the history of war and fascism, two ideas that have become very relevant today.
So what happens to these bones when someone finds them? What does it mean to go looking for them? And what happens when the bones belong to Nazis? My name is Nick Casey. I'm a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, based in Madrid. Sometime back, I was reading headlines in France, and I came across a story about a man named Edmond Ravet.
At 98 years old, he'd gone to his local newspaper to make a confession. At the end of World War II, when he was a French resistance soldier, he said his squad captured a group of 47 German soldiers, but they never brought them to a POW camp. They took them instead to the woods, had them dig their own graves, and then executed them.
At the end of his life, Reveille wanted to set the record straight, and he said he knew exactly where the bones were. So who do you go to after this kind of revelation? I soon learned that there's a private organization in Germany whose mission is to go looking for those bones.
They're called the Volksbund, and for more than a century, they've been trying to find the bones of every German who died during the World Wars, even the Nazis, so they can give them a proper burial. When I first heard about its mission, it raised so many questions for me, like, what does it mean to go looking for the bones of war criminals? What kind of controversy does that cause?
The Volksbühne is a pretty low-profile group, but they found new forms of support from people on the German right. And once I started talking to the group, they started telling me about dig sites that they were working on in Lithuania and Poland. At this point, they told me they're digging about 12,000 Germans out of the ground every year. Decades ago, it was more like 25,000.
These numbers really shocked me. And for this week's Sunday Read, I wanted to understand what they mean right now. so I followed the Volksbund out to one of their dig sites in Hungary last year. We drove to a town south of Budapest, near the border of Serbia, where this mass grave was discovered containing close to a thousand bodies of German and Hungarian soldiers.
We pulled up to an empty lot on the edge of the road, and I saw an excavator had dug up a ramp about 10 feet deep into this very sandy earth. And at the end of the ramp, you could see a wall of human bones that went up so high, almost to the surface. In front of me was a complete jumble of bones. Leg bones, arm bones, multiple skulls with tree roots coming out of them.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of bones discovered in Europe?
As countries rebuilt after the war, most of these killing fields were simply paved over as Europeans sought to turn a new page, leaving the daunting task of finding the dead for future generations. Many countries around the world have an organization like the Volksbund.
But nowhere is this work more fraught than in Germany, where memory and forgetting are constantly bound up in a struggle to confront or avoid a guilt that was so vast that many references to the country's nationalist past remain taboo even today. Germany is a place where the flag is rarely waved outside soccer games, and giving the Nazi salute can be punished with a prison sentence.
Germany's response in the lead-up to the Russia-Ukraine war was hampered because it didn't want to be seen as a military force. Yet even as the country has sought to avoid reminders of its history, the remains of that past keep turning up. The war graves of 8,000 to 12,000 Germans are uncovered each year.
Bones have been uncovered by excavators digging parking garages in German villages and by telephone workers laying fiber-optic cable where battles took place in the 1940s. At the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, soldiers outside Kiev were digging trenches when they came across the skeleton of a man.
He was a German soldier who died during the last war fought there, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union some 80 years before. Complicating matters is the rise of the far right in Europe and around the world.
For the first time since World War II, extremist parties have become ascendant across the region, and in places like Italy, Austria, Hungary, and the Netherlands, these movements mirror, and in some cases trace their roots directly to, the fascist groups that triggered the war.
In Germany, the charge is being led by the Alternative for Germany Party, or AFD, which in February's snap election became the second largest party in Parliament, nearly doubling its seats there. AFD has reshaped the German discourse on issues like immigration and climate change, but it is the party's approach to the old taboos of the war that have collided most squarely with German norms.
AFD leaders now denigrate what they call a cult of guilt around how the Nazi past is taught in schools, and they have reached out to figures of the American right for help. Before the February election, the tech billionaire Elon Musk stumped for the AFD after giving a Nazi-style salute at President Trump's inauguration.
Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents, he told a crowd of AFD supporters at a rally. Weeks later, at a security conference in Munich, Vice President J.D. Vance threw his support to authoritarian movements across Europe, telling German leaders that there is no room for firewalls between extremist parties and the seats of power.
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Chapter 3: Who is Edmond Ravet and what did he reveal?
Some time after I returned from Germany, I looked up Arthur Graf, the man who organized the petition against the cemetery. Dead people need to be buried, he said when I called him in the Netherlands. You can't just leave them lying there. But the man who ultimately sent Anne Frank to her death? By offering him a tomb like anyone else, he said, the Volksbund had gone too far in its mission.
It made Nazi dead look like the war's victims, not its criminals, a goal that Graf told me he suspected was behind the Volksbund's desire to care for the graves. I asked Graf what he would do with the site if he were in charge. I'd put an earthen wall around it, he told me. Let the brambles grow. That's it.
The Volksbund gets its leads from a variety of sources, and sometimes the source is the person who buried the bodies. In May 2023, a 98-year-old named Edmond Reveille told his local newspaper that he had something to confess. At 19, he had been part of the Maquis, a guerrilla group that fought the Nazi occupiers in France.
In the last days of the war, his squad captured a group of 47 German soldiers. Instead of taking them to a POW camp, Reveille said, his squad took the prisoners to the outskirts of a village called Maymack, told them to dig their own graves, and shot them all dead, along with a Frenchwoman believed to be a collaborator.
Reveille said the members of the squad all swore that day never to speak about what they did. Now they were all dead but him. He wanted people to know what happened and, perhaps most important for the Volksbund, he said he still knew exactly where the bodies were buried.
When I arrived that summer, the old man had already led the Germans to a site about a 15-minute drive from the center of Maymack. But the passage of time had transformed the putative killing field. The once barren hills were now covered by a towering forest of Douglas firs, planted after the war. Still, the Volksbund felt good about the site.
Its ground radar system, though unable to detect bones, had sighted what looked like bullet casings and the evidence of disturbed earth. As the Germans went about their work, I went looking for Reveille. His confession was a big news story in Europe. At least one reporter had staked out his home.
But by the time I arrived in Maymack, the frenzy had calmed, and Revea agreed to meet me for lunch at the home of his friend, the village dentist. He walked in wearing a checkered newsboy hat and brushed off all attempts to help him to the table. Aside from a slight stoop, he caught a dashing figure for a man nearing his 100th birthday.
So you want to hear the whole story, he asked after finding his seat. His resistance squad, he said, was commanded by a former French reservist whose nom de guerre was Hannibal. On June 7, 1944, the squad attacked the city Tula, and the next day it took 55 prisoners.
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Chapter 4: What is the mission of the Volksbund?
Instead, it said it had found her grandfather's remains behind the villa. I started crying, she told me. I got emotional. Aust showed me a sepia portrait of Hiller, who looked out with sunken eyes, a middle-aged man who had already lived through one world war. Hiller didn't fight for the Nazis, Aust said, but the regime trusted him with leading food distribution as Breslau fought on.
Finally, in April 1945, Hiller was killed in an air raid. Aust's husband, Gauti, began to show more pictures, but at one point his wife asked him to stop. Gauti closed the photo album and looked up from it with a polite smile. It seemed we had reached something the couple didn't want to be seen. I asked Aust what was in the last photos. She wouldn't say.
Someone rang a bell signaling the beginning of the ceremony. A sprinkle of rain began to fall, and various officials took to the lectern, speaking about the war in Poland and the need for Germans to acknowledge their responsibility for their crimes. They spoke about Germany's campaigns of extermination against minorities. In the crowd of Germans, I was one of few foreigners there that day.
No Polish representative spoke at the ceremony taking place in their country, even though some were invited. And it was perhaps because of this environment that a new theme emerged. Not guilt, but grief. Many said that despite the devastation that was inflicted by Germany, their families had been victims too, and wanted closure of their own from the war.
One spoke of a relative who died on Christmas Day in 1941. The military deacon told the story of his grandmother, who did not know whether to declare her husband dead after he was taken as a prisoner of war into Russia. When we remember the dead in front of God, we don't think about a mass of people. We think about single people, a name, a home, a family, he said.
God of peace, we ask you for the people we have buried here today. We only know a few by name, but we trust for you they are not a number, but your children. There was a moment of silence as the trumpeter played. Later, men with shovels came and buried the 306 bodies for the second time.
The following month, I sat down with Bakken, a former brigadier general who now serves as the Volksbund's chief executive. There was something strange about the funeral to me, not just to see the ceremony done with military honors, but to see Germans grieving as much for themselves as for their victims. I knew this was the natural response when people bury their dead—
At the same time, it all seemed to break with some unspoken prohibition about how to remember these particular combatants. Certainly there was an acknowledgment at the funeral of the national guilt Germany still faced, but when it came to the responsibility of the family members who chose their path during the Nazi years, those single people, in the words of the chaplain, never again...
was replaced by recollections like those Aust had for her grandfather about their positive individual qualities instead of their monstrous collective crime. Maybe it is harder for families to carry stories of guilt than for nations. I asked Bakken what other taboos might be changing in his country. Its distrust of the military was one, he said.
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