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Stories of veteran service and sacrifice straight from the people driving today’s most important veterans causes and veterans organizations around the world. The show shines a spotlight on their inspiring projects making a real difference for veterans and their families, and along the way we'll hear the stories that drive them to do their best every day as they work to support veterans and their memory.
00:00:06:03 - 00:00:29:05
Speaker 1
Hey, it's Matthew Cudmore and welcome to Story Behind the Stone. In today's episode, my colleague Matthew Stewart sits down with Danny Chahbouni and Melissa Grosche from the Volksbund, the German War Graves Commission. Together, they dive into the Volkswagen's mission, looking after more than 830 military cemeteries across 45 countries, and how these cemeteries are being transformed into spaces for reconciliation and education for the next generation.
00:00:29:06 - 00:00:49:00
Speaker 1
They also explore the War Biographies project, uncovering the personal human stories hidden behind the headstones to inspire future generations and foster global reconciliation. Danny, Melissa, thank you for joining the show and to our listeners, thanks for tuning in.
00:00:49:02 - 00:00:58:18
Speaker 1
Danny. Melissa, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and chat with me today. And thank you for welcoming me into the headquarters of folks this afternoon. Yeah, thanks.
00:00:58:18 - 00:01:01:08
Speaker 2
For having us here for the podcast.
00:01:01:10 - 00:01:09:21
Speaker 1
Danny and Melissa, you could introduce yourself to our listeners and just know a little bit about who you are and what you do here at the books. My name is Melissa.
00:01:09:23 - 00:01:25:12
Speaker 3
I'm here working part time for the Volksbund. I'm still doing my master's in history, and I work for the War Biographies project. So I write and reconstruct stories of German soldiers that are on the focus on cemeteries all over the world.
00:01:25:13 - 00:01:50:00
Speaker 2
My name is Danny Chahbouni I'm the head of the communications division. Originally I started as the specialist for exhibitions, so the first one a few years ago started to develop cemeteries into learning sites, equip them with more like submissions, educational science, produce multimedia content to decide. So this was my first job and then I became the head of division for the communications.
00:01:50:00 - 00:02:07:22
Speaker 2
That means that I'm responsible for all the outside communications like social media, the membership newspaper we are producing two times a year, the website I'm still in charge of the exhibitions and the archive, and also the historical research projects that Melissa has imposed.
00:02:07:22 - 00:02:11:12
Speaker 1
Us a lot of work. It sounds like a lot of responsibility between the two of you.
00:02:11:13 - 00:02:14:15
Speaker 2
It's one of the the biggest divisions that we have.
00:02:14:19 - 00:02:22:12
Speaker 1
For those of our listeners who might not know, could you maybe give us a brief introduction to Volksbund and what Volksbund does?
00:02:22:13 - 00:03:06:06
Speaker 2
Well, the first one basically is the German War Graves Commission. We're taking care of all the German military cemeteries abroad, which originate mostly from World War one and World War two. But there are some places that may have a connection to the German Franco War of 18 1771, or even the German Danish War. The German War Graves Commission is a private organization, but we're working on behalf of the German government, so our funding to maintain the sites and develop them to learning sites and keep them open to the public is partly provided by the German government, but also raised through private donations, private funding, membership fees and civil engagement to German society.
00:03:06:07 - 00:03:07:21
Speaker 2
Who wants to support our work.
00:03:07:23 - 00:03:09:21
Speaker 1
A lot of very important work as well.
00:03:09:22 - 00:03:29:01
Speaker 2
Even in times like these, with all the wars going on all over the world, it seems a little bit like that. Our work becomes more important over the course of the years. Then that's maybe was 5 or 7 years ago. It was important at this time too. But these topics are so present currently that even we are sometimes a little bit frightening.
00:03:29:01 - 00:03:31:03
Speaker 2
How current our our mission.
00:03:31:05 - 00:03:50:18
Speaker 1
You know, as you mentioned, obviously the Volksbund is the German War Graves Commission. And so I'm curious, I kind of wanted to start the conversation out about learning a little bit about you guys and what brought you into this line of work. And so I'm curious if maybe you could tell us, maybe the experience that you had the first time that you stepped in to a German War Graves Commission cemetery?
00:03:50:18 - 00:03:58:11
Speaker 1
Was there something that spoke to you or drew you in, or anything about it that made you really understand that this is something that you wanted to be a part of?
00:03:58:11 - 00:04:24:00
Speaker 2
I'm a historian, like Melissa. When I graduated from university, at first I worked in public relations, then I switched over to scientific work. I was a research assistant and a memorial site at the former Inter German border, which is like a German-American memorial place. It's an former observation post of the 11th ACR of the American military, who was on guard at the inter German border during my studies.
00:04:24:00 - 00:04:44:12
Speaker 2
Military history always fascinated me, so I worked a few years there before I started at the Volksbund. During this time, my work was also focused on creating exhibitions and explaining history to people. I became really intrigued when I learned that the Volksbund is doing this abroad in other countries, on the cemeteries. I applied and they hired me for this job.
00:04:44:12 - 00:05:17:00
Speaker 2
And since then it's it's been a while. It's nearly six years since I started here, and it never gets boring because there is so much history on these sites connected to these sites. It's not always the the pleasant part of our history, but it's definitely interesting to think about strategies, how we explain this to future generations, and how transport our messages with the dark backgrounds that we have to be very careful with to a broader audience to maybe change things for, for better, for the future.
00:05:17:01 - 00:05:43:21
Speaker 3
My first experience with the Volksbund was actually on abroad on a Volksbund German military cemetery in France, when I took part in an exchange with a city in Normandy. In my high school time, we participated in the 100th commemoration of the end of World War 1 in 2018, in one win. Because I specialized in history in high school, we took part in this school memorial.
00:05:43:23 - 00:06:07:08
Speaker 3
We, my friend and I, we did the speech in front of all these people, probably also in front of some of my colleagues now, I guess. And yeah, just I was been always interested in history. My grandparents talked about what their parents or their fathers did during World War two, and luckily they all survived. But we talked a lot about that, and that drew me into history.
00:06:07:08 - 00:06:24:20
Speaker 3
When I saw the open position for doing interviews with contemporary witnesses. And I wanted to do that because I like to do this biographical work to focus on the stories, love stories, but also very tragic stories and cruel stories of so but yeah, that's what I like to do.
00:06:24:22 - 00:06:42:06
Speaker 2
So I also have a personal connection to the photos, because I think in 19 that my grandmother died, she suffered from dementia and she always talked about her father, Paul, my great grandfather. I knew that my great grandfather was a soldier during the Second World War. And then I started to research a little bit more what he has done.
00:06:42:06 - 00:07:04:18
Speaker 2
And I learned that that he was not only a soldier in the Second World War, but a veteran of the First World War. The Volksbund has actually notified. We learned this from historic documents that we found in the belongings of my grandma or her dad, that my family got notified by the fortune that my great grandfather has died in France and is today resting on a German military cemetery in Andy Lee near Metz.
00:07:04:20 - 00:07:24:12
Speaker 2
And it gives a personal connection to the work, and it's also a symbol for the work of the Volksbund in the past, because the mission of the first one was always to provide a place of mourning to the families. Give them a clarification. What happened to their fathers, husbands, sons who were sent to fight in foreign countries and never made it home?
00:07:24:12 - 00:07:28:07
Speaker 2
So the work here has also a personal meaning.
00:07:28:08 - 00:07:38:22
Speaker 1
Over the last of the. When the mission seems to have changed, it's been just over 100 years. I believe that it's been in existence. So how has the mission changed in the last hundred years?
00:07:38:23 - 00:08:08:15
Speaker 2
Like our British kind of parts of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the first one was founded in the end of the First World War. It was due to the circumstances of the time, the German administration government wasn't longer working. Everything was breaking apart a little bit. So there were like grassroots movements of people who organized themselves in private associations to find out about what happened to my relatives who were sent to fight in France and never made it home and were missing in action somewhere.
00:08:08:16 - 00:08:29:00
Speaker 2
Then there were members of the official grave service that the German government provided during the years of the First World War, and they joined this private association and founded today's Volksbund to take care of the cemeteries, to bury the dead, the recovery, the debt and give them a fight burial on a German military cemetery. Some of them were buried in field.
00:08:29:01 - 00:08:53:12
Speaker 2
Graves were scattered all over France and Belgium, all over the the combat zones of the First World War. So this was the original historic mission of the first one, which continued and continues up to this date, was maybe isn't so publicly well known is that we still recover approximately 10 to 15,000 German soldiers each year, for example, in the Baltic states, in Poland and Belarus.
00:08:53:13 - 00:09:19:06
Speaker 2
Up to this day. Of course, we are doing other things today, so we have a whole network of commemoration and youth encounter that was forged over the course of the decades since the first one started to exist in 1990. We are in charge of the German Remembrance Day, which is annually celebrated in November, and organizing the official ceremony and the German parliament building the German Reichstag.
00:09:19:06 - 00:09:32:23
Speaker 2
But not only they're all over Germany. You have smaller events with commemoration speeches, all kinds of events to remember the fallen and learn about the history and try to educate people to build a better future.
00:09:33:00 - 00:09:57:11
Speaker 1
You had mentioned the personal connection that you have to the Volksbund, and the fact that your great grandfather was found and reburied. Those efforts continue today in 10 to 15,000 soldiers are identified or found every year. For those that are identified, what do you think it means to the families now to get that notification that a family member has been identified and is ready for reburial?
00:09:57:12 - 00:10:18:02
Speaker 2
It's a form of personal relief to learn what happened to my relatives, even after all these years. It is as current as it was in the 1950s to give people clarification about the fate of the relative. This is a humanitarian mission. We are following my grandmother, by the way. She never had a photograph of the grave. My family never traveled to this cemetery in France.
00:10:18:03 - 00:10:43:04
Speaker 2
The first point in the past organized bus trips for relatives to these cemeteries, often very far away in Normandy, in Middle and Eastern Europe, in Italy. And it was a form of humanitarian relief and help for these people who were mourning their losses and who maybe couldn't afford to do this on their own. I mean, we're talking about the the immediate aftermath of the, for example, Second World War.
00:10:43:04 - 00:11:00:17
Speaker 2
There wasn't so much travel ongoing at the time. It wasn't possible. It's a different generation. If I compare it to Melissa and my generation, it mainly it was normal to grow up in a unified Europe and travel in all the countries you want. This wasn't the case for older people who maybe never had these experiences with travel abroad.
00:11:00:17 - 00:11:15:15
Speaker 2
So this was all organized by the first one to give people a form of humanitarian relief and clarification about what happened to the relative, provide them a place of mourning. And even with the service that we send out pictures of the graves to the relative to the families. Yeah.
00:11:15:18 - 00:11:29:13
Speaker 1
And Melissa, you work in biographies. And so when bodies of soldiers are discovered in these mass graves, or when new soldiers are found in identified, do you start to get to work in that process, or at what point does your biographical expertise come into play?
00:11:29:14 - 00:11:55:09
Speaker 3
Yeah, my work starts as soon as relatives get to us and deliver us any form of biographical material. Well be few postcards, any military records, or like the booklet which documents where the person the soldier was stationed. As soon as they give us these remains, we start to write and reconstruct the lives and try to give them their story back.
00:11:55:10 - 00:12:15:18
Speaker 3
And sometimes it's not only the relatives that give us these things, but also people who bought a new home and found a box on the attic. They don't know what to do with these things. So they come to the folks bond and say, okay, do you need these things? And then that's how we can remember these people, because nobody really cares anymore about them.
00:12:15:18 - 00:12:28:12
Speaker 3
And then we give them their story. It's also important to contextualize and to work historically, and to put these stories in the historical context, to know what happened during the war. One and.
00:12:28:12 - 00:12:36:21
Speaker 1
Two, are there certain stories that you've been able to uncover, or that you've researched that maybe strike you in one way or another?
00:12:36:21 - 00:12:58:16
Speaker 3
It's always sort of fascinating to see what these people did before the war. Example I recently wrote a biography for one soldier who died. I'm doing the song The Battle of the Somme that was just commemorated, and recently he was a composer. So he wrote songs and he had the perfect pitch. He was able to to play the piano, the violin and everything.
00:12:58:16 - 00:13:21:22
Speaker 3
And then he just ended up in the trenches of War one and died there. And it's now the cemetery in Africa. That's very to to see what can happen to people in this war. It's also striking to see how loving people can be in the letters, but then commit war crimes. That's also part of our daily work to have this ambivalence in the letters.
00:13:22:00 - 00:13:29:11
Speaker 1
Danny, I'm sure that, you know, throughout your historical research, your work, you've also come across interesting stories or something that struck you.
00:13:29:17 - 00:13:58:14
Speaker 2
Sometimes it's devastating. Like I said, you have all groups of people who are interred on all cemeteries. Like, every military is like a cup through the society. You have people from the upper classes as the lower classes, as evil people who committed serious crimes, war crimes, who were involved in the directly involved in the Holocaust, as well as the 16 year old Hitler Youth boy was seduced by the propaganda into the machinery was really no choice for this young individuals.
00:13:58:14 - 00:14:20:06
Speaker 2
And the interesting thing with the biographical research is that we can reconstruct their way of thinking, and sometimes from the primary materials like the diaries, the field post letters, the official documentation that comes with the convoluted that we get from the relatives, that we get a clear picture not only of the historical facts, but sometimes of the thinking of the people.
00:14:20:06 - 00:14:47:08
Speaker 2
So you learn. And this is what history is really about. It's about reconstruction, past events. But the history is normally not black and white. It has these different little shades of gray. If you want to say it like this. And this is what you learned from these primary materials, and we try to give people their individuality back, give back the personality that is on these relatively uniformly designed military cemeteries hidden behind the stones.
00:14:47:08 - 00:15:09:12
Speaker 2
It's a relatively anonymity that we face on these cemeteries, and we try to make the stone speed explain to younger audiences, especially to younger audience, what these people went through and what their way of thinking was. And this is also a contribution to the German concept of civic education, which demands always a multi perspective.
00:15:09:14 - 00:15:20:12
Speaker 1
You touched on maybe the architecture a little bit like the way that cemeteries are created in the Volksbund. Curious if you could explain a little bit about the theory behind the construction and how that has also evolved?
00:15:20:12 - 00:15:41:09
Speaker 2
So we have to dig a little bit in the history of the first one itself as an organization. So it was founded in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Some of the people who inspired the organization in the early years were notorious nationalists, and so was the head architect of the folks. But he was from the old elites of the emperors, right, of the Kaiser right.
00:15:41:12 - 00:16:08:19
Speaker 2
And so was the first head architect of the Robert Tischler. There is historic evidence about this. He was inspired by nationalist ideas, and he translated this into his design speech and into his architecture. His concept, called Home Abroad Heimat in the Ferner, was basically the idea to build little Germany's abroad, to give a resting place to the fallen soldier that looks a little bit like the German environment.
00:16:08:21 - 00:16:31:15
Speaker 2
It sounds a little bit strange, but here was also that the dead soldiers are forming a defensive belt around the borders of the Reich. So in the form of combat zones. So the German cemeteries from the interwar period and the 1950s up to Tischler death in 1957 are a little bit designed, like military fortresses. I think there is no English word for totenberg.
00:16:31:15 - 00:16:55:03
Speaker 2
Maybe the trench term as well is the best way to translate it. So you have these buildings that look a little bit like military fortresses, like trenches. You have small entrance ways. The idea that the architecture overwhelms you a little and brings you in a mood of mourning, of darkness. The architecture touches you in a more emotional way, and you have this military references.
00:16:55:03 - 00:17:28:06
Speaker 2
So this is the the early years of the Volksbund up until death in 1957. And this changes over the course of the years. So after that the first one started to have architectural contests. Sometimes they hired pretty famous German architects from the times of the 1960s and 1970s to construct the cemeteries. Ignatius like, for example, Dietz Brandy, who contributed to many public buildings in Germany, who designed the German cemeteries in Birmingham and Anastasia in Sicily, and others who contributed.
00:17:28:07 - 00:18:00:07
Speaker 2
If you see the cemeteries from the different decades of after the Second World War, they tried to change in a little bit. They get away from these militaristic architectural design elements, the trench like design, the narrow entrances to more, well, open places to say it like this. What is not changing over all the decades up to the 1990s, when the first one started to construct as the cemeteries, the first new cemeteries in Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War is that the architecture never glorifies.
00:18:00:07 - 00:18:22:01
Speaker 2
It's an architecture that more or less reflects about history. There is no white marble, there is no shining, no glorification, no heroism in the German design. It's more like the architects try to adapt the cemeteries into the existing landscape and try to transport more decency, more reflection in the dance.
00:18:22:04 - 00:18:31:21
Speaker 1
At many of your cemeteries you have installations that educate the visitor. Why do you think it's so important to use these places as points of education.
00:18:31:22 - 00:19:04:02
Speaker 2
Where, from a historic point of view, these were first and foremost places of mourning. Cemeteries is the intended use. And then there comes another function to these places, to these sites. This is derived from the international law. A war cemetery is always also a place of reconciliation for the former enemy nations. So it wouldn't be a little bit out of touch for the Germans to create a cemetery that is really heroistic in the way it is designed, according to our history, the educational purpose that you've mentioned, that is something that was developed by the Ford in the 1950s.
00:19:04:03 - 00:19:21:18
Speaker 2
The idea was to bring young people of Europe together at these sites, the former combat areas, the resting place of the fallen soldiers of both world wars, to get in touch with each other, to learn about the shared history, to do maintenance work there, to learn about the people who died there, who often would at the same age.
00:19:21:20 - 00:19:39:04
Speaker 2
Sometimes friends of these young people who were drafted in the army in the last days of the war. And this continued up to this day. This changed a little bit over the course of the decades. Our youth educational programs, or work camps, as we call them today, they are not so much focused on maintaining the sites and cleaning the headstones.
00:19:39:04 - 00:19:57:04
Speaker 2
It's more focused on historic learning. Bring young people from nearly every nation of this planet together to peacefully learn about each other's history and culture, and develop and learn about the democratic culture of conflict resolution by discussion and cultural exchange, and the sites of the cruelty of the past.
00:19:57:04 - 00:20:03:23
Speaker 1
Beyond the work camps that you just described, are there any other ways that you engage the youth of today with the history of the past?
00:20:04:00 - 00:20:35:22
Speaker 3
Yeah, the Volksbund has several youth education centers all over Europe, for example, in one in France and in the Netherlands or on the island of in Polish German island, and that these are centers where school classes can come together, do trip there, and work with the biographies that I when my team right. And they learn about the cemetery, about the history, about the local history, but also the international history of the wars.
00:20:35:23 - 00:20:56:04
Speaker 3
And it's a good way to really be there, be in the place, engage with place and a good addition to the work camps. I would say there's also the program called Peace Line. That's a route you can take as a teenager and you travel from city to city, take a different route, for example, the Baltic route, the radar routes.
00:20:56:04 - 00:21:08:00
Speaker 3
Every city, you learn about the history, how it's connected to one, what two, you learn about how Europe's history shaped the city. Yeah, that's also a great way to connect young people from all over Europe.
00:21:08:01 - 00:21:11:04
Speaker 1
Why do you think it's so important to engage these young people?
00:21:11:06 - 00:21:39:04
Speaker 2
Well, I think young people out of future, they are the future leaders, the future managers, the future decision makers. So it's good to educate them about their historic responsibility, bring them together, let them shape a better future. Maybe that sounds a little bit idealistic, but this is what our work is really about. Using the memorial or the resting places of the fallen, of the historic mistakes humanity made, the historic cruelty that people did to each other and try to build a better future.
00:21:39:08 - 00:21:49:04
Speaker 3
And I would say, you can see how the contact with the folks will shape our lives. Yeah. And I just hope that it shapes other people's lives when they get in contact with these stories.
00:21:49:04 - 00:22:00:07
Speaker 1
You showed me earlier a little bit of your archives series, and you have millions of archival records. What kind of historical resources does your team rely on to build these archival records?
00:22:00:07 - 00:22:22:07
Speaker 2
When it comes to individual fates? Soldiers, it's definitely the real documentation that we have in our archives, personal documentation that often is provided to us by the families and the relatives, their own primary materials if we get our hands on them. Sometimes diaries that were written out in the field by the soldiers field post letters who were sent home.
00:22:22:07 - 00:22:59:09
Speaker 2
But then we rely. Of course, we rely on official documentation like primary materials we get from the military archives, the archive of the German Foreign Office, the Federal Archive of the German Federal Republic, private archives that have collected anything that you can imagine about the historic events connected to our cemeteries from construction plans, historic maps, etc. this is all part of our paper trail that we take care of in our archives and use it for our work, and we currently working on a huge digitalization project to make it more publicly available.
00:22:59:10 - 00:23:15:19
Speaker 2
And in the next years, the first one is about to move in a new federal headquarter. And our vision is that we then have an archive that is open to the public, where everybody can work with the historic documents. There is still a lot of work to do, but we are in a good path.
00:23:15:20 - 00:23:22:12
Speaker 1
As you look forward for like the next ten years, are there specific projects that you think are the most important that guide the Volksbund towards the future?
00:23:22:12 - 00:23:47:11
Speaker 2
So we are working on developing more of our cemeteries into learning centers. Melissa mentioned our youth encounter centers and currently have three of them. We provide accommodation for workshop groups and school classes, and they always connected to a particular German military cemetery. And with our history centers that we currently develop, we plan to develop more cemeteries into full blown learning sites.
00:23:47:12 - 00:24:21:12
Speaker 2
We equip them with exhibitions, we provide workshop rooms. There is something called the theory of the third place, which originally comes from sociology, means that there is a third place between your private space at home and your workplace, and this is a place where you can encounter other people, where you can discuss topics, where there is public exchange of opinions, etc. our cemeteries and this option shall be a little bit like third place, where we enhance the engagement of people, where we provide spaces that are open for discussion and we equip them with the historic facts.
00:24:21:13 - 00:24:39:22
Speaker 2
This is something that is, especially in times like these, where we confronted with fake news and artificial intelligence. It's very important that you find quality information based on scientific facts that is provided to you by partners you trust, where people can learn without falling to fake news.
00:24:40:01 - 00:24:49:02
Speaker 1
Thinking ahead in the short term, I suppose. Do you have any special projects that you're focusing on in the next six months that you want to let our listeners know about?
00:24:49:03 - 00:25:20:12
Speaker 2
The most important projects for the next months will be our cemetery in Cannock Chase, which is designated as one of these history centers. We renovated the historic and landmark protected building. Together with our British partners. We will equip it with exhibition that will be open to the public each day, and we develop learning materials and other stuff connected to the cemetery to turn it into a history center, a learning site that is open for the public to visit it and learn about the photo and learn about our British partners, about reconciliation and all the topics related.
00:25:20:13 - 00:25:22:02
Speaker 1
Sounds like an exciting project.
00:25:22:04 - 00:25:42:22
Speaker 2
It's a little bit like one of the first projects we are doing as an by national team, to go for our British partners. I think it's the first time that we are working in that way. We really are a mixed teams Germans and British colleagues to gather in different fields, from construction of the building to exhibition planning, interior design, etc. to make this happen.
00:25:43:04 - 00:25:46:05
Speaker 1
Is there anything that I didn't ask? Is there anything that you want to say?
00:25:46:06 - 00:26:02:05
Speaker 3
You can access our biographies via the website. So you just Google the cemetery you would like to see some biographies from. You can just click to the biographies and then you will see the biographies. That's what we've researched, contextualized and put up online.
00:26:02:06 - 00:26:40:19
Speaker 2
The most important step stones for the future, without limiting it to six months or the next years, will be digitalization. That's why I'm really glad that we have the chance to work together with Memory Anchor, and that we had the chance to test your application and the last year, or cemetery and internationalization, because our work changed, as I explained over the course of the last years from an organization that was more or less focused on the relatives to an organization that conveys that international learning culture and international remembrance culture, and tries to explain to other nations how Germans commemorate and remember to internationalization will be a big topic for us in the next years on
00:26:40:19 - 00:27:06:15
Speaker 2
every level of our organization, and we are currently trying to find more ways to work. Multilingual AI will be a huge helper for us in this way. We introduced an AI translation tool on the portal on our website that Melissa just mentioned, so that the contents, which previously were only available in Germany, are now available in different languages like English, French, Polish and other important languages of the world.
00:27:06:15 - 00:27:19:18
Speaker 2
And yeah, we are also trying to figure out how we can open up more to an international audience, find more international partners to explain our work, and to collaborate for the future and hope new channels of communication.
00:27:19:18 - 00:27:26:12
Speaker 1
One thing that a lot of people might not know is that the Volksbund has locations, cemeteries in more countries that even I realized.
00:27:26:13 - 00:27:51:18
Speaker 2
Well, you're present on nearly every continent. Generally, we always say that we take care of over 830 cemeteries in 45 countries worldwide, and this is the big cemeteries of both wars and West and Eastern Europe. But it's also smaller places. There are cemeteries in Africa, not only the big ones from the Second World War from Afrika Korps, but also smaller ones from the colonial area, from German Imperial troops.
00:27:51:18 - 00:28:13:18
Speaker 2
We have a cemetery in Nazareth, which is not the most common or the most popular part of our history that Germany and the Ottoman Empire had in alliance. And there were German troops stationed in different parts of the Ottoman Empire and fought alongside the Ottomans during the First World War. There is a cemetery not only in today's Israel, but also in Tarabya and Turkey in other parts.
00:28:13:23 - 00:28:25:14
Speaker 2
This former empire, we have memorial sites from a prisoner of war camp, for example, in Australia, Northern America. Literally, we are present on every continent, this planet.
00:28:25:15 - 00:28:46:05
Speaker 1
Taking into account the diverse locations that you have, cemeteries and the variation in architecture that's changed over the years. In philosophy of construction, do both of you have specific cemeteries that you would recommend somebody go visit if they wanted to get? Since the punt and your mission and your ideology?
00:28:46:07 - 00:29:14:11
Speaker 2
So last week I worked in Denmark on our cemetery, and we just connected the cemetery to the Danish Flux Museum, which opened a few years ago. That's a cemetery that is not only a military cemetery, it's a refugee cemetery. So many German refugees from Eastern Prussia and other former German Eastern European settlements ended up in Denmark and then were interned there after the German capitulation, and had to stay until 48-49.
00:29:14:12 - 00:29:37:21
Speaker 2
Many of them died and were buried on Danish soil or cemeteries, and Oxburgh was one of the biggest one that we have in Denmark. And this place has a special aura. It's entirely encircled by rhododendron hedgerows and gives this place a special quietness, a special aura. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to, despite the dark history that is chromatid to it.
00:29:37:23 - 00:30:07:09
Speaker 3
I recommend wandering in Normandy not only because of the scenic look on the show, but also because of the different stories that you can find. And not only German foreign soldiers, but also Hungarian soldiers who fought for the German army, but also civilians who died during a raid since stuff like that, or just this young boy who tried to escape and then ran into the forces and then was sent to a prisoner of war camp in France.
00:30:07:09 - 00:30:19:18
Speaker 3
And right there, he just wanted to run away from home. Yeah, just very diverse stories that you can find in wandering. And the landscape is impressive. Also the architecture, like it's very interesting. Yeah.
00:30:19:19 - 00:30:28:19
Speaker 1
So for our listeners, wanted to learn more about either of these cemeteries or any of the other cemeteries under the purview or more just about the Volksbund in general. Where should they look?
00:30:28:20 - 00:30:33:05
Speaker 2
Check out our website.
00:30:33:07 - 00:30:54:16
Speaker 2
You can find all the information about our organization, about our cemeteries, about our work there in different languages. You could check out our social media sites like Instagram or Facebook. Just look for Volksbund. Or you can just send an email to us info at and ask questions there.
00:30:54:18 - 00:30:59:20
Speaker 1
Thank you both so much for taking time out of your afternoon to sit down and chat with me. Been an absolute pleasure.
00:30:59:21 - 00:31:11:19
Speaker 2
Thanks for having us. Thanks for providing us the opportunity to explain our work to your audience. Thank you.
00:31:11:21 - 00:31:24:21
Speaker 1
Thanks so much for tuning in. Story. Behind the Stone is available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on the Wreaths Across America Radio Network on iHeartRadio. Audacity and tune in to search for wreath.
00:31:24:23 - 00:31:26:00
Speaker 1
Thank you for tuning in.