| BELGRADE, Yugoslavia--Architect Pedja Ristic, a founder of the Society for Serbian-German Cooperation, was 14 in the fall of 1944 when the Yugoslav partisans and the Red Army advanced on German-occupied Belgrade. At that time his family lived in Vozdovac, a neighborhood situated one kilometer from the city center. "A mortar shell fell onto the yard in the back of our street and killed four Germans. My father and I came out a little later and buried those four soldiers before Russians arrived there," remembers Ristic. Before burying them, the two removed the name tags around the killed soldiers' necks in order to preserve their identity. Ristic stuck a wooden pole at that spot and put a glass bottle on top of it. "Shortly thereafter we moved from there and when I passed by that spot a little later I noticed that the pole was no longer there. We kept the name tags with us for a while, but they were also somehow lost in that war-time chaos," Ristic says. The street hasn't changed much since. The yard where the soldiers were buried is now the backyard of a school. The recent recovery of the remains of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's father from an unmarked grave in a Romanian village, where he was buried as a Wehrmacht soldier killed in combat, has reopened the difficult question of the destiny of German soldiers who lost their lives in WWII. According to German archives, more than two million Germans have remained buried outside the boundaries of today's Germany. After the battle of Belgrade in October 1944, in which the Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito--aided by the Soviet Red Army--took over the city, some 15,000 dead German soldiers and 9,739 prisoners of war remained behind. The extremely high number of dead has been attributed to the fierceness of the battle for Belgrade, a key crossroads. But the unpleasant question that begs an answer today is what happened afterwards with the bodies of the killed. Unlike in other countries where Hitler's Germany waged war, not a single marked cemetery exists in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, according to the German Society for Care of War Cemeteries. THE SECRETS OF THE EARTH The facade of a large building in the very heart of Belgrade still displays scars from the battle of Belgrade 57 years ago. Back then it housed the Transport Ministry. Nowadays the building serves as the HQ of the Yugoslav national railway. Ristic's father was a railway worker. As soon as the fighting ceased, Ristic accompanied his father to the ministry. As Ristic senior inquired about his new work schedule inside, his son found out from some soldiers what had been happening. "The building had been one of the main targets in the German lines of defense and it was in pretty bad shape," says Ristic. Many German soldiers remained in the long maze of corridors in the basement. "The partisans and Russians chased after them through that labyrinth, and as soon as they would catch someone, they would take him to the little park in front of the building and execute him right there." The victors dug a long zigzag shaped ditch in the park, which was covered with fresh earth for the most part. The killings were still going on while Ristic junior waited for his father. "While I was waiting, I walked through the park in order to see a soldier who had just been shot. As I was walking along the ditch, I felt the ground caving in under my feet. I asked myself aloud what it was, and one of the partisans there told me it was 'the German ribs' that were caving in," recalls Ristic. More than a hundred German soldiers--who had either been killed in the building or executed in front of it--had been thrown into the ditch there. "I still remember the exact spot where the ditch was dug," says Ristic. The park is located at the intersection of Sarajevska and Nemanjina streets, some fifty meters from Belgrade's main railway station. Nothing indicates that hundreds of people were buried here. Today a concrete footpath stretches over the entire length of what old Belgraders say is a mass grave. Most passersby who stop for a short break at a few benches there have no idea that they are, in fact, sitting on top of a burial site. It is not uncommon, however, for Belgrade communal workers who maintain utilities to uncover skeletons which are presumed to be those of killed German soldiers. Local media reported two years ago that workers laying water pipes had found two skeletons in the very center of the city. The only things remaining from the gear were unrecognizable buttons and Mauser rifle bayonets, used by the Wehrmacht. Sinisa Kadic, a member of the executive board of the Public Communal Corporation Funeral Services in Belgrade, says that it is unlikely that the issue will be tackled soon. "We have very little information about the locations where German soldiers were buried. We've learned that some graves in the Bezanija and Novi Beograd neighborhoods were dug up when new buildings were erected. We have asked the German Embassy here to help us, but they don't seem to be terribly bothered," says Kadic. In 1994, engineer Ljubinko Petrovic lived in a house in the Crveni krst district of Belgrade. He says he watched executions of German soldiers by the partisans and Soviets from his window. "They would bring Germans in groups, line them up at the edge of the ravine, and fire long rounds. It all went on for a long time," says Petrovic. What horrified him even more was that at night the partisans would also bring Belgraders for summary executions. "They called them 'enemies of the revolution' and simply gunned them down over dead Germans. Russians executed people for two days, and our people, the communists, for two nights. The victims' bodies would fall one over the other, just like that." END OF PART ONE |
| 24 May 2001 Walking Over Dead Bodies "Whenever I see that a game is being played there, I ask myself how the spectators would react if they knew that the game was being played on top of a mass grave." by Branimir Gajic and Milorad Ivanovic |
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