German mass grave sheds new light on close of World War Two (Feature)

By Boris Raseta Feb 17, 2011, 2:06 GMT

Zagreb - Croatian police have completed the exhumation of remains from mass grave in a Zagreb suburb, on one of more than 200 known sites where thousands of Germans, both soldiers and civilians, were buried in the closing days of the Second World War.

Yugoslav communist partisans carried out executions across the c country as the Nazi regime crumbled and fell in 1945. So far the Croatian interior ministry has compiled a list of the sites more than

200 German mass graves.

Yet just a handful of the sites have so far been investigated.

One was discovered two years ago at Harmica, where an estimated 5,000 soldiers of the German Wehrmacht were shot and buried, including 500 officers.

'We don`t know exactly how many Wehrmacht soldiers were executed here,' said Vladimir Geiger of the Croatian Institute for History. 'A mass grave must hold at least three corpses, but there can also be 15,000.'

'The remains must be exhumed and analysed and only then can we discuss concrete figures. But even then we can never be sure of the nationality of the victim, because not only Germans, but also Croats and Poles and others served in Wehrmacht,' he said.

Of course, it was not only soldiers who were buried in mass graves. And the sites are not only in Croatia, but also in Serbia, Slovenia and elsewhere in former Yugoslavia. Geiger's institute is attempting to assemble a list of ethnic German civilians who also perished in the war.

'The list of German victims includes 26,000 women and 5,800 children who died in Yugoslav camps,' Geiger said.

These victims were from the around 500,000 ethnic Germans who lived in former Yugoslavia who did not flee ahead of the Soviet Red Army advancing from the east. Of the 200,000 who came under the Communist authorities, just a few thousands survived.

Thousands were killed and tens of thousands died of malnutrition and disease amid horrendous conditions in the camps between 1944 and 1948. After that, most survivors were driven out of the country.

In Croatia, at least 18,000-20,000 ethnic Germans were brought to the camps, where at least several thousand of them died. In Serbia, where the majority of the Germans lived, the figures were several times larger.

When the grave at Harmica, 50 kilometres northwest of Zagreb, was unearthed in April 2009, Interior Minister Tomislav Karamarko gave an even grimmer estimate - saying that there were 840 mass graves in Croatia alone and 'who knows how many more' across the region.

And Karamarko has again promised an investigation of crimes committed by Communists partisans six and a half decades ago.

The authorities were meanwhile sharply criticized by the former president Stjepan Mesic, who recently suggested that the mass graves are being opened and investigations promised only because elections are due.

'I welcome (his) pledge, but it comes 20 years too late,' he said in an interview. 'All other post-communist countries investigated and condemned the communist crimes.'

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