The Sunday Read: ‘Unburying the Remains of the Third Reich’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	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 Sen.
0:09.2	You probably don't think of it as a place where you're stepping over killing fields.
0:14.5	And yet, that's also what Europe is.
0:17.5	It's a vast cemetery.
0:20.7	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.
0:41.1	They're being found in people's backyards when they plant a garden,
0:45.1	by excavators digging out basements, and alongside freeways.
0:48.7	It's the history of war and fascism,
0:51.6	two ideas that have become very relevant today.
0:55.7	So what happens to these bones when someone finds them?
0:58.1	What does it mean to go looking for them?
1:01.5	And what happens when the bones belong to Nazis?
1:05.1	My name is Nick Casey.
1:08.2	I'm a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine based in Madrid.
1:14.8	Sometime back I was reading headlines in France, and I came across a story about a man named Edmond Ravei.
1:16.9	At 98 years old, he'd gone to his local newspaper to make a confession.
1:22.3	At the end of World War II, when he was a French-resistant soldier, he said his squad captured a group of 47 German
1:30.2	soldiers, but they never brought them to a POW camp. They took them instead to the woods,
1:36.8	had them dig their own graves, and then executed them. At the end of his life, Ravei wanted to set
1:43.1	the record straight, and he said he knew exactly where the bones were.
1:48.2	So who do you go to after this kind of revelation?
1:52.1	I soon learned that there's a private organization in Germany whose mission is to go looking for those bones.
	...

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