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Welcome to the History Extra podcast.
Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine.
For both Britain and Germany, the two world wars saw hundreds of thousands of casualties.
But what happened to the bodies of those who died on enemy territory?
And what impact did this have on their bereaved relatives and their nation's memory of the war?
Speaking to Emily Briffitt, Tim Grady, author of Burying the Enemy, explores how both nations cared for their fallen foe during and after the First and Second World Wars.
We're here today to talk all about your new book, Burying the Enemy.
Thousands of British and German servicemen died on enemy soil during the two world wars.
What were the greatest causes of this and how did this differ between the First and Second World War?
That's a great question.
Yeah.
So during the Second World War it's perhaps more straightforward, because during the Second World War we're very much dealing with an air war over both Britain and Germany, with the bombing campaigns.
And this would have been the cause of the greatest number of deaths during the Second World War.
Planes being shot down on raids over enemy territory, as it was at the time.
And quite often, sometimes people did manage to parachute out, but quite often people not surviving these crashes.
If you look at the First World War, it's a bit more complex.
And when it's dealing with the First World War, the main reason for enemy losses would come down to people dying in internments or in prison of war camps.
So both the British and the Germans captured people, principally on the Western Front, for our purposes, and then brought people back to Britain, back to Germany, and put them into POW camps prisoner of war camps.
And it was within the camp system that perhaps the largest number of people in the First World War died lost their lives.
And that happened in a whole variety of ways, really.
So sometimes it's through sickness.
So the biggest example of this would be the influenza pandemic towards the end of the First World War.
And that swept through camps in both Britain and Germany.
Well, you can imagine a POW camp, quite confined environments.
And the pandemic, the influenza spread through the camps quite rapidly and took a lot of lives.
Other people died in rather mundane circumstances, actually, sometimes through accidents.
Because people in Britain really, from 1960 and onwards, the British allowed people to go out and work.
And then accidents happen.
Not a lot of health and safety, I think, at the time going on and people injuring themselves in coal mines, in quarries or whatever.
This kind of thing.
Actually, even in the Second World War, people later on were let out of the camps a bit more and fell off bikes.
Quite innocuous accidents and lose their lives on enemy territory.
So a whole host of reasons there.
What was each nation's attitude towards dealing with these wartime losses?
Was it seen as a moral issue or was it more of a practical one?
Yeah.
So, I mean, at the end of the day, it comes down to practicalities.
So when somebody dies, even if they're on the other side, on the home front in both conflicts, you're faced with the question of having a body.
Both the British and Germans therefore inherit an enemy body and they have to do something with that body.
In practical terms, the body needs to be disposed of for sanitary and hygiene reasons.
So on a very practical level, something has to happen there.
There's also the stipulations of Hague Convention, Geneva Treaty, which stipulated that the dead should be even enemy dead should be buried with some respect at least.
So on these levels, something again had to happen to the dead.
Now, how they were actually treated, though, differed slightly between the two world wars.
It also slightly differed between both countries and it slightly differed to during the point of the conflict we're in you know which stage of the conflict.
Now, sometimes people were given grandiose kind of treatment, in fact.
So this often happened, perhaps more.
Where say, the prisoners of war?
For example, they were allowed on occasion to bury their comrades who died in internment.
A group of prisoners of war might be able to take a body to a cemetery and accompany the body to the grave and take part in the funeral.
And that happened in both countries, actually, in both conflicts.
On other occasions where...
And I'm thinking here, perhaps the air war in the Second World War.
Sometimes there was very little of remains that were left and it became really a matter of disposal.
And then there's also no living in terms of.
POWs or so and so forth around to accompany whatever remains there are to a grave.
And then, on the worst and the most extreme level would be in the latter stages of the Second World War in Nazi Germany, where there was such animosity really being driven from the centre of the regime towards Allied airmen who were attacking the country that a lot of these bodies were sometimes just chucked in pits or just buried, thrown recklessly, with no ceremony, no care, no understanding and no respect.
But at the end of the day they still buried somewhere for practical reasons.
You mentioned thereabouts. some of the more grandiose services that were held.
At any point was the treatment of war dead used as more of a political bargaining chip or for what could be seen as perhaps morally less favourable reasons?
I think both sides were very aware in both conflicts that If you're dealing with the enemy dead, this is a potentially reciprocal issue.
So they know that the other side also dealing with their dead.
So you want to show that actually we're treating these dead with respect, if you like.
We're trying to make propaganda out of this effectively, because we kind of want our dead to be treated the same.
And we want some kind of respect to be dealt with the bodies overseas as well.
So there is that understanding that's going on.
And for that reason...
Both sides were very keen to have photographs, quite happy for reports to go out, news reports of some of the ceremonies that took place.
Some of the most grandiose and most surprising perhaps were in the Second World War in the UK, where coffins were taken to the grave, taken to cemeteries in this country, with swastika flags on top of the coffins, reefs being laid, and so on and so forth.
These are often very public funerals, if you like.
They're not hidden, they're seen.
And then again, reports get into the newspapers, photographs get into the newspapers.
And all of that would be quite surprising, really.
But it was done because you want to demonstrate, look, we're an honourable country.
We're dealing with the dead in this way.
We also hope you will deal with our dead in a similar kind of fashion, if you like.
During the wars, where exactly were these remains to be laid to rest?
That's also a crucial issue, really.
Where do you bury these dead?
But today we're very aware of the big military cemeteries, the big national cemeteries, which are normally national-based and quite striking symbols of conflict and ways of commemorating conflict.
But that's a latter post-conflict development.
So really during the wars, both wars themselves, It's a case, once again using that word we just had, which is a practical solution.
And the practical solution during the conflict is really to find OK, where's the nearest cemetery to where we are?
Where's space?
Where can we put these this body or these bodies and where can we lay them to rest?
So that quite often what that meant was parish churchyards, municipal cemeteries.
And, as a result, this meant you ended up with enemy bodies scattered all over both countries.
Over 700 or so different cemeteries in the UK used the burial of German servicemen during both conflicts.
So it's not a case of a single place.
We're dealing here with graves covering almost every corner of the country, somewhere in local communities.
And were there any markers to identify them, as if I put in inverted commas as the enemy in?
So the graves.
Well, they should be marked under international law.
The grave should be marked with a simple grave marker was what the stipulation was.
And this generally did happen.
Again, there's differences.
It's not always the case.
And certainly towards the latter stages of the Second World War.
In Nazi Germany there were quite a few unmarked graves, often from people from the air war.
Once again, identification wasn't always possible in cases or sometimes it was just neglect.
But really, all graves were generally marked in some way.
During the conflicts, both conflicts, this tended to be for the most part with a simple cross.
But the simple cross would state, say in this country, would state German airman or German.
German POW or what have you.
So there'd be some indication that this was an enemy grave.
Now, on occasion, even during the conflicts, you've got more, if you like, grander kind of grave markers being put in place, and this is more the case again.
What you always need, i suppose, is you need the living, because marking the dead involves living, and really to get a grand, a grave marker or some form of headstone involved having A live enemy around you.
So this happened, most commonly say, with the prisoner of war camps, and some of the prisoners of war would collect money, raise funds within the camps to pay for headstones or to pay for even, if you like, a stone memorial for their comrades or those that they knew who died from their camp.
As you said, the enemy dead were actually then placed amongst local communities, those who they may have seen as their foe, almost.
What was the local response to what could be seen as these vanquished foe being laid to rest amongst their friends families relatives, their community?
I mean, that's what happens because you're utilising local cemeteries.
So you can find an enemy body right next to a close relative's grave.
When there were larger numbers of dead.
Sometimes there was an attempt to try and move or to place enemy graves and the war dead more generally into one section of a cemetery.
But sometimes when you're just dealing one or two bodies, that didn't happen.
Now the kind of response to this.
I think for the most part, the way people looked at this was, While you could look at the enemy as being a threat and people could be fearful of the enemy, once the enemy was dead they're no longer a threat.
They're no longer a danger anymore.
This is the enemy deceased.
Now, local people were very aware of the enemy buried in their midst, if you like, because the funerals, as I say, were not really private affairs.
They could be quite public affairs.
The bodies would be taken through local streets to a cemetery, because you have to get to the cemetery somehow.
So that's all very visible.
If you then later on go into your local cemetery and you see grave markers there, local people and local communities are aware of this.
There was occasional resistance, but for the most part people seem to accept that OK.
The German say, if you take, the British might be our enemy in this conflict.
But we understand they've got to be buried somewhere.
Did the memory of the First World War shape people's attitudes to the enemy dead individually?
That's an interesting question.
No, I don't.
To be honest, I'm not sure that it did entirely.
So after the First World War in this country, in the UK.
The graves of the enemy dead were still scattered throughout the country and people had been caring for, quite often caring and interested in, these dead of the First World War.
Local people had been Looking at these graves as a way to think about, sometimes relations, sometimes about conflict, sometimes about death and on occasion, also about reconciliation.
When it came to the Second World War.
To be honest, it was just a case of adding more bodies to local cemeteries.
It didn't seem to really have shaped the way that people dealt with the enemy, in any case as far as I can really think about that.
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One thing you said earlier was about the bombing raids and the increase in bombing raids and how that may have changed people's attitudes.
In what way was this?
If we think about this, if it comes down to the fact that the enemy is now attacking, bombing and damaging urban areas, you're seeing that risk increase.
You're seeing your communities under attack, really.
The relationship at that point to the enemy, I think, changes somewhat.
Now, we can see that even in this country in the First World War.
So we had Zeppelin raids over the UK in the First World War mainly principally, in the south of the country.
But the only real kind of anger and open dissent against enemy funerals occurred at some of these funerals for Zeppelin crew.
And one example, which I think was near Potter's Bar, was where somebody stood out and threw eggs at the coffins of the Zeppelin crew as they were taken to the cemetery.
And when the police took this person into custody and thrown the eggs, she said that A family relative's house had been destroyed in the Zeppelin raid.
And she was.
You know it was that personal effect of the enemy getting so close and touching into her lives had led to that response.
Now, when we fast forward to the Second World War, where attacks are increased.
The air war is so much more intense.
You can imagine that the attitude expands somewhat.
So when it comes to using swastikas on German coffins during World War Two, a lot of the anger is people saying hang on.
But these are the people who are attacking us.
They're trying to destroy our homes.
They're trying to destroy our lives.
And we're treating the enemy with that kind of respect.
OK, bury them for sure.
But don't necessarily go over the top.
And then if you look at Germany, Goebbels as propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels uses these attacks against Germany, the increase in the bombing war, to try and push people's anger onto these Allied airmen, Americans and the British airmen in the RAF, which leads to physical attacks and also murders of some airmen.
And then you're seeing then that some of that hatred is carrying on into the way that the bodies and the dead are also being treated in the later stages of the Second World War.
One of the things that's becoming quite clear as we're chatting is this complex relationship between the living and the dead.
I wonder, on that local note we've said about how the enemy dead were buried amongst local communities?
Were they cared for in the same way someone might tend to a relative's grave?
So people are buried during the two conflicts, as we've said.
The wars end, although I should say people continue to die, actually because of the long legacies of conflict, occupation and POWs still being held.
But the graves themselves then remain.
Gradually, people return home.
The prisoners of war are returned and so on and so forth.
But the graves are not returned.
So the graves remain there in these local cemeteries and scattered through both countries.
So then what happens to them?
Who's going to look after them?
Now, it falls under the responsibility of the war graves commissions.
But on a local level, local people also start to take an interest in these graves.
So you see people laying flowers on the graves, local people, people start to tend the graves.
There's the case in Bishop's Stortford, actually, where there's a good number of graves there.
And two local women decide to almost take on these graves as their own and start to tend them and lay flowers for Christmas and all of this kind of thing.
And that's quite common that people start to take the graves into almost into their own community.
I guess some of that's based on a sense of common humanity perhaps, that these people have died in conflict.
Their graves are here.
Now, we need to do something for them because the relatives are a long way away.
So who's going to look after them?
Some of it also goes back to that question of reciprocal relationship.
Well, hang on.
I hope somebody's looking after our dead like we're looking after theirs.
You know, let's try and show that we're caring for them.
And then perhaps some sort of bonds will happen and... things will improve.
Possibly some of it's also to do with early thoughts of reconciliation, I'd say as well.
Let's build out of conflict.
Let's try and construct a better world.
And caring for the dead.
Caring for those who are fighting against you, is potentially a way to do that.
Did having that presence of well the enemy in the midst of local communities almost act as a reminder as well?
Yeah.
So these are like sites of memory.
They're prompts.
They exist.
They're there.
They're visible there as the enemy.
So when people see these graves, the reminder.
The reminder is That somebody, or a group of people from the other side, as it was, had died in the midst in your community.
So it's a kind of prompt that something had happened.
Now, then you people start to ask themselves, well, how would that person died locally?
Was it air crash?
Was it?
You know, an accident.
What had gone on for somebody to lose their lives in the midst of our community?
For me, some of the biggest questions then potentially could have come in post-war Germany, where some of the graves were people who'd been killed, almost lynched, during the Second World War.
And if that person is buried locally, then there's questions there in terms of how did they end up in that grave in our churchyard?
What had happened?
So they are important prompts, as you say, in terms of sparking memory and getting people to think about what was a very recent history.
In cases such as those, how were those questions answered?
I'm not sure that they ever were fully answered, you see.
I think they could be a prompt for local discussion.
But a lot of that is kind of internal, private relationships where that discussion is going on.
Where somebody's been killed or lost their lives or been murdered through a war crime.
People are not answering those questions openly amongst themselves in the community.
But.
Where the questions then come is a few years after the war ends, when investigators start to come and start to exhume those bodies and start to look into those graves and start to ask the question OK, why?
I'm thinking here in terms of British post-war war investigators are looking into potential war crimes in post-second world war germany.
They're looking and then they're saying well, why is that grave here?
How's that person died here?
And they're asking local people these questions.
Local people aren't volunteering the questions themselves, so the questions are coming from allied investigators.
It's a rather uncomfortable part of the story.
After the wars, repatriation wasn't really an option.
The dead weren't afforded the same privilege as the living to be able to come home.
Do we have a sense of the impact of these losses on those who were bereaved?
The British make and have made very clear since the early years of the First World War that their policy was non-repatriation.
The dead were not going to be returned to this country, not going to be returned to families.
And that's a policy that then continued through to the Second World War.
So obviously, as a result, if you died on enemy territory in Germany during World War I or World War II, you're going to stay on enemy territory.
The Germans followed a similar kind of policy of not returning their dead to Germany, more in a kind of bureaucratic hurdles.
As such.
That stopped repatriation rather than an outright ban as the British imposed.
But in both cases, what this meant was that the loved ones were having to look and having to say okay, My son, my father, my husband, whoever else is now forevermore seems to be stuck overseas.
And I think after the First World War, when this policy was fresher in people's minds, it was a newer policy that develops out of the First World War.
There's considerable anger amongst Americans.
Quite a few British relatives have the thought that their loved one is now going to stay in Germany forevermore.
And they can't really believe it because they're thinking, OK, the war's finished.
Surely you can repatriate him.
Surely you can take the remains back.
And this was a much wider debate that was going on at the time in terms of.
If you look to the Western Front, are the bodies going to be returned from there?
But I think it was with slightly more anger, slightly more emotional attachment to this, to this argument, to this debate, because the dead are buried on enemy territory.
And it was thought, OK, fine.
They may remain in France or Belgium, but Germany is a slightly different matter here, because this is the country we're fighting against.
And there's some really quite sad stories of people saying, hang on.
My son always made it clear, whatever you do, if I die, I don't want to be sucking Germany.
I've got to come home.
I want my body returned.
And it never happens despite, in some cases, several years and years of people campaigning for the return of their loved ones.
I think what adds...
Slight sadness to this as well, or heats up the argument somewhat, is that other countries do repatriate their dead.
The French return bodies from the UK back to France.
The Americans have a choice in terms of where the bodies are going to be returned to, and so on and so forth.
So all of this feeds into the debates that are ongoing.
Something that struck me from your book was that some warm relations did actually blossom from such grief, with locals engaging with the bereaved of those whose graves they had taken to caring for.
How did this relationship come to pass?
Yeah, because I do try and make the argument really that I think having those enemy dead buried locally in communities across both countries is a prompt and a spark for discussions and a spark for engagement.
Because when it becomes clear that the dead aren't going to be returned, or in fact, even before it becomes clear that the dead aren't going to be returned As soon as the war ends, people want more information about their loved one.
They're trying to make that contact to their husbands and their sons who have died on enemy territory.
What's most uppermost, I think, really in people's minds is How can we ensure that the grave is going to be looked after?
How are we going to ensure that our loved ones aren't going to be forgotten?
And the way that some people see this happening, then is well, why don't I write to the town that I know?
I know he died near this town.
I'll write to that town and ask.
The council, I write to the authorities there and see if they've got any news.
So that often sparks some kind of connection.
There was a case in Oswestry where a German family write to the local council say our son died near your town, in your town.
We know he's buried there.
I just want to know if his grave is even still there.
Can you tell us?
And the town council, they respond and go, well, we've gone up to the cemetery, we've had a look.
And they write back and the letters then start to go back and forth in this way about the care of the grave.
So having the grave there is that kind of prompt for us.
People, very tentatively at first, daring to contact the living their former enemy and getting discussions going in that way.
And often you get after this we promise we'll look after the grave, we'll send you photos, this kind of thing really.
Did this ever grow into something more?
Yeah, it often started with letters and exchanges in this way.
And sometimes it went as far as trips and exchanges.
So then people would try and work out, OK, we know the grave's there.
Now, can we come over and visit the grave?
Sometimes they got into discussions about.
Could we put up a different headstone?
Could we change the headstone?
Could we put up something?
We want to put up a personal headstone.
Can you help make the arrangements for that?
People would, as I say, then come over on visits to the grave.
And often when they came over on visits, they're then greeted by local people, or local people would come out and say oh, don't worry, I'll help you.
See the grave?
There was one case in Essex, late 40s, early 50s.
A brother of somebody who died locally.
A German who died locally, travelled over to Essex and a local family said Do you want to stay with us?
We've got a room for you.
We'll show you the cemetery.
Don't worry, the grave's been cared for and so forth.
And it gets to really kind of very personal, breaking down barriers, kind of discussions and relations going on.
Now, the authorities had other plans in mind for the commemoration and burial of the dead.
What was this and how did this differ between Britain and Germany?
Well, yeah.
So when we talk about the authorities here, I'm thinking of the War Graves Commissions principally.
Now the War Graves Commissions.
Their ideal and the way that they function is, And what's really important and crucial to their work is ensuring the longstanding care of the war dead.
And the way that they've gone about that.
If we take the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, for example, the way they've gone around that is to try and concentrate the dead into larger cemeteries.
And I'm sure people will be very familiar to, the large military cemeteries, say in Normandy, World War II, or along the former Western Front areas in France and Belgium where you've got very, if you like, the regimented graves, all really beautifully cared for attended, following a kind of familiar and reassuring pattern.
So when it came to these scattered graves, say the scattered British graves in Germany after World War I, eventually the World Graves Commission decided that they'll have to do the same thing in Germany.
And they form four large cemeteries in Germany where they remove, dig up and exhume all these scattered graves into these four cemeteries in Germany.
And these four large cemeteries very much replicate the cemeteries that you'd see anywhere else.
They're very familiar and very visibly familiar imperial war graves, commissioned cemeteries, as it was back then when it came to slightly different when it came to the German dead in the UK, principally because the Germans aren't able to move all of their dead into a single cemetery until the 1960s, which is dedicated to 1967 on Cannock Chase.
People might know the German military cemetery on Cannock Chase.
So we've got them from the time of the First World War through until the 60s, where the dead remain scattered throughout the UK.
They're only exhumed.
Sometimes almost 50 years later.
They're exhumed, dug up and moved to Cannock Chase.
But ultimately, the goal becomes the same one.
We want all of the dead to be placed into one national cemetery, one military cemetery for all of our dead.
And the idea being that within the boundaries of the cemetery are the German dead from World War One and World War Two who died in the UK following the principles of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, where they have all of their dead in these larger cemeteries.
Now, initially, maybe taking a look at this, you might think that.
We're moving all these people to be alongside their fellow brothers in arms.
We're creating that sense of community, that sense of shared loss.
But presumably there were more complexities behind this.
There were a lot of complexities behind this, because exhuming or moving bodies has its own requirements.
The whole host, as you could imagine, in terms of regulations you have to go through.
So there's a lot of complexities there.
There's a lot of complexities into the practicalities of digging up and transporting bodies to another part of the same country, and particularly when you're dealing with thousands of bodies.
But you've also got unexpected, unconsidered, I suppose, changes that take place.
And that's the change of relationship between one set of custodians, the people who have been looking after the bodies, or the people who've had these bodies, these enemy graves, on their doorstep.
They were the custodians.
The bodies are moved.
You've now got a new set of custodians, or perhaps a fewer set of custodians, which would be the war graves commissions inheriting these graves and then being the ones responsible for them.
So that changes and alters that earlier relationship which potentially was quite a kind of organic and quite a poignant kind of live relationship that existed often between these local communities as custodians and the bereaved overseas.
Today we can visit these vast cemeteries of enemy dead that are tended carefully and lovingly by the war grave commissions.
How do you think this has shaped our collective memory of the wars and as well as our memory of those who've given their lives?
A lot of the commemorations that we understand and the kind of rituals that develop are based around the larger war cemeteries.
And that's important.
I think one thing that's happened with Removing the Dead, besides the breakdown relations, is that it breaks down these local histories again, that there's no longer that understanding that perhaps the enemy had died locally.
Because then what you've got is really that you've removed a certain set of graves from local communities.
So we've dug out, as I said, say in the UK 700, over 700 or different places that the enemy graves were in, where they were buried.
You've removed those then.
And in doing so, you've also removed that connection to a history, potentially a shared history.
You've also removed that kind of prompt that got people to think, OK, hang on.
There were other people who died in this conflict.
The other side also suffered and they also suffered within our town or village or what have you.
So you've stopped those stories.
And I guess what then remains are your own dead and your own war dead.
You've stopped asking.
You stop thinking about the other side because they're out of sight and out of mind.
What remains are your own dead?
And then I would argue that it becomes easier to construct narratives about your own wartime suffering and your own wartime losses because you're no longer considering the losses that stretched across borders and stretched across boundaries.
It has become perhaps easier to construct this sense of war memory that is more singularly focused and less about a global conflict involving multiple players.
Stories like this really nuance the narrative.
What do you think the history of the British and German war dead buried on enemy soil tells us about that fluctuating relationship between the two nations and their people post-war?
This is very much a British-German relationship here.
It's very much a British-German history, this, for sure.
And I suppose we've had this long debate and the way the historians have approached this often is about the antagonism and the developing antagonism that comes to a head during the First World War and this very awkward relationship between Britain and Germany in the interwar years.
And it's always then about how did the two sides try and develop out of this?
Have they stopped looking at each other as foes?
And this goes through, of course, if we look at the wider history of British-German relations after World War II too, that sense of antagonism still being there.
For me, what this says is that actually, if you move instead of a top-down focus, but you look from below much more and you start to focus on On ordinary people, you actually find that often the war was less of a ultimate kind of break and moment of division.
It also left opportunities for people to come together and people to find points of contact and people to find something that they had in common.
And people also, to find that kind of shared history and that shared narrative of the war dead and shared narrative of wartime loss didn't just divide both countries.
It also brought them at times closer together.
That was Tim Grady, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Chester.
Tim is the author of Burying the Dead, the story of those who cared for the dead in the two world wars.
He was speaking to Emily Griffith.
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Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.
Each week I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.
In our all new season we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.
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