Interest wanes in war graves, German memorial commission says

Nov 14, 2010, 18:32 GMT

Berlin - Interest in Germany in tending the graves of its fallen soldiers is waning, a war-graves agency warned on Sunday, the country's annual remembrance day for the dead in two world wars.

President Christian Wulff and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle laid wreaths at the main Berlin war memorial, the Neue Wache.

Both said the lesson of the wars was to strive for peace. Westerwelle said the 21st century had barely begun but was full of conflicts. 'Our world is not a peaceful one,' he said, adding that nationalism was dangerously on the rise again in Europe.

On remembrance day, Germany remembers it dead in the 1914-18 and 1939-45 wars and all those killed by the Nazis.

The federally funded German War Graves Agency, which tends war cemeteries and memorials in Germany and abroad, said Germans should never forget how many of their own they lost.

'The number of people showing any interest in the topic keeps declining,' said its president, Reinhard Fuehrer.

Every year the agency recovers the remains of more than 40,000 German soldiers killed in fighting and reburies them in its 827 neat war cemeteries in 45 nations. The agency oversees 2.3 million graves and runs online databases which list the names of all the dead.

Separately, Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg laid a wreath at Berlin's monument to post-1955 military dead.

He recited the names of all those who died in 2009 while deployed with the German armed forces.

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