D.he project is controversial, the fronts are hardened: In Bremen, the Senate wants to build a railway workshop on the site of the former “Russian cemetery”. But there have been protests against this for a long time: the Bremen Peace Forum and a local citizens’ initiative pointed out that the remains of almost 300 Soviet prisoners of war could still be there.
Archaeologists have been searching the site for three months – and have so far found remains of bones and almost two dozen soldiers’ identification tags. They also recovered a skull, reports the Bremen state archaeologist Uta Halle in an interview with the FAZ. They have already been able to assign nine of the brands to people. Halle and her team were able to find the names and dates of birth in a database of the Russian Defense Ministry. “That’s nine people to whom we were able to give their identity back.”
Rolled through files and studied cards
Halle is approaching the case. Even during the preparatory work for the excavations in July, she was convinced that they would still find human remains. She had pored over files and studied maps for weeks until she was sure that there was something to the information from the peace forum and the citizens’ initiative. Apart from a few historians, people in the city were convinced that after the end of the Second World War, all bones from the “Russian cemetery” had been transferred to a cemetery of honor. “Now we have to find out that the exhumation was incomplete,” says Halle.
In the Oslebshausen district of Bremen there were several labor camps for prisoners of war from 1941 to 1945. Especially in the early days, many of them died of exhaustion or illness after just a few weeks. The cemetery was located between the barracks and the workplaces at the industrial port. “The prisoners had to walk past it every day,” Halle reported in July. After the Second World War, the area was partly fallow, and some smaller companies settled there.
The area would actually be ideal for the red-green-red Senate to build a railway workshop there. The French railway company Alstom, which is supposed to better connect Bremen and Bremerhaven to the north-west of Lower Saxony, was awarded the contract. The Senate is hoping for 100 new jobs. But there has been resistance to the plans in the district for years. The spokesman for the Peace Forum, Ekkehard Lentz, demands that the area be recognized as a war cemetery that is protected under international law, that planning be stopped immediately and that a memorial be erected. The topic is also important because it is about the memory of Soviet prisoners of war and forced laborers.
During the Nazi war of annihilation in Eastern Europe, millions were killed, but their suffering was “not burned as deeply into our collective memory” as “our responsibility” required, warned Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier this year on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Assault on the Soviet Union. Lentz accuses the Senate of ignoring this responsibility. He wants to wait for the final results of the excavations first.
Originally only six months were planned for this. According to the current findings, it will probably take longer, says Halle. But she also emphasizes that there is no time pressure on the part of the city. “We’re done when we’re done.” Bremen is already in talks with Ukraine and Russia about the whereabouts of the finds. It was not until Monday that representatives of the Russian embassy visited the excavation site.
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