The German War Dead and the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge: Lessons in Memorializing the Perpetrator

By Amelie Pelletier

Edited by Amina Emes & Miranda Blell, Peer Reviewed by Alex Bagdade

Memory work following large-scale international conflicts is often inseparable from physical spaces that carry symbolic meaning. This is particularly evident in the design, establishment, and maintenance of soldiers’ final resting places. Following the American Civil War (1861-1865), which shaped modern traditions of war dead burial, cemeteries, burial grounds, and memorials proliferated as sites to honor those who sacrificed their lives. Across countries directly involved in conflicts or on whose territory battles were fought, expansive cemeteries marked by long rows of white crosses, orderly tombstones, and commemorative art stand as austere reminders of the human cost of war. In the case of World War II, Allied cemeteries specifically commemorate those who contributed to defeating the Third Reich, whose atrocities remain seared into collective memory. These memorial landscapes, visited by both residents and tourists, provide spaces not only for remembrance but also for reflection on the price of peace and the enduring imperative to prevent future conflict.

Yet the burial of enemy soldiers posed a far more complicated challenge. In postwar Europe, Germany faced the unprecedented task of managing the bodies of soldiers who had fought for a regime responsible for genocide and large-scale disaster. Citizens confronted mass casualties in urban ruins, lacking resources, authority, or guidance under Allied occupation to dispose of the dead. Furthermore, families of the deceased sought comfort concerning the treatment of the bodies of their loved ones abroad. Unlike the Allies, Germany could not publicly mourn or honor its dead without risking glorification of perpetrators. These conditions created a moral and political dilemma: how could the dead be treated with dignity without producing sites of martyrdom or heroification? How could international law, occupation policies, and local sensitivities shape the burial of German soldiers, both at home and abroad?

The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves Commission, hereafter referred to as Volksbund), emerged to address this dilemma. Tasked with overseeing the burial of German soldiers in Germany and abroad, the Volksbund had to navigate both practical and moral ambiguities. In doing so, it developed practices that emphasized the shared suffering of all war dead, creating a depoliticized language of universal victimhood. This approach, while facilitating the organization of burial and commemoration, also illustrates the delicate risk inherent in postwar memorialization: without clear guidance, commemorative practices can flatten power dynamics, blur distinctions between perpetrators and victims, and shape collective memory in subtle but significant ways.

The Volksbund thus serves as a case study for understanding the broader stakes of postwar burial politics. This paper examines the moral, political, and spatial frameworks governing the burial of German soldiers, both in Germany and abroad. It analyzes which entities held authority over these spaces and the principles guiding their creation, explores the ethical and practical challenges these decisions generated, and considers how burial practices contributed, if unevenly, to reconciliation or collective memory. Ultimately, it argues that although the Volksbund was a necessary entity which facilitated the disposal of remains as well as early forms of postwar reconciliation, some of its approaches risked and continue to risk moral equivalence between the victims and the perpetrators of the conflict.

Postwar chaos and the origins of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge

When the Red Army entered Berlin in May 1945, the devastation of the city was immediate and overwhelming. Streets, buildings, and infrastructure lay in ruins, and the human toll was staggering: countless bodies were left unburied amid the rubble, victims of battle, starvation, and disease. In a society that had long constructed meaning around death through heroification and selective commemoration during the war, Germans were suddenly confronted with mass mortality without guidance or infrastructure. Makeshift cemeteries, coffins, tombstones, mass graves, and other emergency means of disposal left them “trying to salvage graves that amounted to personal memorials or were linked to the recent past and the individual memories of the war experience.” In Berlin especially but throughout Germany, individuals were left in great proximity with their unburied dead. This was a distressing position: lack of resources, war shock, and political vulnerability left Germans under the authority of the Allied armies, with little to no agency over the burial of their dead.

The origins of organized German war burial trace back to the aftermath of World War I. Prior to that conflict, war burials were often undertaken by the armies themselves or by local villagers, and German soldiers who died abroad were most likely buried on site. However, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles included a clause that “recognised any Commission appointed by an Allied or Associated Government for the purpose of identifying, registering, caring for or erecting suitable memorials over the graves and to facilitate the discharge of its duties.” This provision led to the creation of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, or German War Graves Commission. The Volksbund became the leading entity in charge of repatriating and overseeing the burial of German soldiers. The Treaty also foreshadowed the need to provide an adequate burial to any dead of the war regardless of nationality or country of death, as stipulated in Article 225: “the graves of prisoners of war and interned civilians who are nationals of the different belligerent States and have died in captivity shall be properly maintained.”

During World War II, burial of the German dead was managed by a dedicated department within the Nazi regime. Yet, as the Third Reich collapsed, the phenomena seen in Berlin (bodies accumulating with little infrastructure, guidance, or resources) spread across Germany. Although the German Red Cross, the leading mass medical emergency institution controlled by the Nazis, was disbanded by the Allies upon their arrival, the pressing need for such an organization led to its reestablishment under Allied supervision. A West and Unified Germany Red Cross and an East Germany Red Cross became primarily responsible for overseeing burials within Germany.

In the following months, the immediate crisis receded and responsibility was re-assigned to the Volksbund in 1946. The organization undertook the enormous task of burying German soldiers both domestically and abroad, guided by both moral and legal imperatives. Its mission was reinforced by the 1949 renewal of the Geneva Convention, which stipulated that “signatories in Europe were obliged to take care of the graves on their territory, including the enemy’s graves. Countries of the former German occupation concluded a special agreement with Germany concerning the preservation and protection of the German graves abroad.” Today, the Volksbund oversees 832 military cemeteries in 46 countries, accounting for approximately 2.75 million dead, from Egypt to Ireland to Canada. It claims responsibility for the burial of military personnel as well as civilians and victims of genocide, positioning the organization as the central custodian of German wartime memory across national and ideological boundaries.

Parameters for burial of the German war dead in Western Europe

Within Germany, war cemeteries were constructed according to broader principles governing post-World War II memory work. In Western Germany in particular, the Allied presence imposed a denazification and reeducation process aimed at stripping the country of lingering National Socialist ideology and reintroducing democracy, freedom, equality, and human rights according to Allied principles. Much of this process involved the removal or transformation of Germany’s monuments and physical spaces of Nazism, including statues, parks, and cemeteries. Central to this effort was ensuring that German citizens were confronted with their responsibility and guilt in the conflict. American soldiers in Germany carried out “forced confrontations,” in which German citizens, including children as young as five years old, were tasked with exhuming, observing, and reinterring victims of death camps in their own cemeteries whilst Americans looked on, as a grim reminder of what their government had done. This focused responsibility set the tone for the way Germany would be allowed to bury its own dead: as perpetrators of tragedy rather than as national heroes.

Written regulations for the burial of German war dead were sparse, yet certain patterns emerge across cemeteries created for this purpose. In Germany itself, a special law for war graves was passed in 1952 to protect the burial places of “Nazi victims, meaning Jewish concentration camp prisoners, political opponents, forced laborers, and soldiers.” The creation and design of these cemeteries, however, was far from a straightforward process. It was not easy for Germans to “remember their dead because they brought about terrible atrocities with two world wars [...] (which) is why German war cemeteries are minimalistic. For the Germans there can be no hero tributes.” Consequently, cemeteries are sober, with markers bearing only names and dates and lacking the grand monuments to heroism that characterize Allied cemeteries. This applied to low-level soldiers and officers, while the Allied forces decreed that prominent Nazis should be buried in unmarked graves to prevent Nazi sympathizers from turning them into shrines. The ranks and affiliations of the dead could also provoke debate. While most cemeteries accepted name and death markers only for low-level enlisted soldiers, some German war cemeteries feature markers for groups such as the Schutzstaffel (or SS, as it is more commonly known). Whether these SS burials were oversights, exceptions permitted by the cemetery, or discovered posthumously, these instances remain controversial.

Regulations governing the burial of German war dead in non-German Western Europe were largely determined by the host countries. Cemetery design often depended on bilateral agreements with Germany and frequently followed the precedent of World War I burial sites. Several factors influenced these designs, including host nation requirements and budgetary allocations. Belgium, for example, “imposed very strict sanctions on German memorials.” Headstones were prohibited from standing upright like those of Allied soldiers, instead lying flat, and some cemeteries forbade crosses altogether. France and the Netherlands explicitly banned nationalist and military symbols in German cemeteries, though Christian symbols and crosses were permitted. In Norway, the government funded granite grave markers for all soldiers, including Germans, while the Volksbund remained responsible for crosses, tool sheds, visitor centers, and related infrastructure.

While bilateral agreements dictated finances and general design, the Volksbund retained considerable flexibility in caring for its dead. This latitude arose for two reasons: first, the relative consistency and variability of World War II German burials in Western Europe reflected trust developed through postwar international relations, particularly due to the extensive Allied role in rebuilding and reeducating Germany. Once it was understood that Germany would refrain from glorification and heroification, memorialization could proceed, generally structured by host-country agreements. Secondly, the chaos of the immediate postwar period which was marked by inconsistencies in denazification and East-West political distractions left the Volksbund with limited supervision, granting it leeway in designing cemeteries abroad. This autonomy, however, sometimes produced controversies related to administrative decisions and the ideological backgrounds of Volksbund members.

The Volksbund in Eastern Europe

While the burial of German war dead developed into a relatively structured process in Western Europe, the same cannot be said for the involvement of the Volksbund in Eastern Europe. The Volksbund was a West German organization and its presence in territories devastated by the German invasion carried significant political and moral implications.

Approximately 30 million soldiers and civilians died in the then-Soviet Union, more than in any other nation involved in the conflict. Eastern Europe was also particularly victimized by Nazi genocide, as it was the location of the majority of concentration camps and the site of many mass killings associated with the regime’s racial policies. The Eastern Front was therefore an exceptionally brutal war space whose legacy left profound trauma across the region. These deep scars, compounded by the famines and political conflicts that followed the war and continue to shape the region today, created a complex and sensitive terrain for the Volksbund to navigate.

The descent of the Iron Curtain in 1945 effectively cut the Volksbund off from accessing the territory where a large portion of German war deaths had occurred. This situation persisted until the end of the Cold War and the gradual process of reconciliation between East and West. In 1990, Germany signed an agreement with the Gorbachev government ensuring the “legal protection of Soviet memorials in Germany.” This step toward reciprocity laid the groundwork for further cooperation. The Volksbund was eventually allowed to begin work on former Soviet territory following the signing of the War Grave Agreement in 1992, which officially came into effect in 1994. The agreement was framed around the principle that “the maintenance of the graves of the war dead on German and Russian soil constitutes a concrete expression of the understanding and reconciliation between the German people and the peoples of the Russian Federation.” Although “reconciliation over the graves” had been adopted as the official motto of the Volksbund in 1953, the dissolution of the Soviet Union provided the first opportunity for this principle to be implemented across Eastern Europe. Prior to 1989, Soviet officials had maintained that there would never be a German grave on Soviet soil. The eventual agreement allowing such burials therefore represented a significant moment in postwar international relations, symbolizing a fragile but meaningful step toward reconciliation between former enemies.

Despite official permission to operate within the Russian Federation, the Volksbund’s work was far from uncontested. One notable example is the German war cemetery in the village of Sologubovka in Russia, inaugurated in 2000. The design and construction of the cemetery began five years earlier as a collaborative effort between Russian architects and Volksbund personnel. Gaining approval from the local community, the veterans’ association of St. Petersburg, and the local Orthodox Church proved to be an arduous process marked by prolonged negotiations and disagreements.

The first point of conflict emerged over the memorial plaque at the cemetery’s entrance, as German and Russian representatives struggled to agree on the start and end dates of the Second World War. The language used to describe the soldiers buried there also proved difficult to settle. The most significant controversy, however, arose over the Volksbund’s intention to install a sculpture at the center of the cemetery. Donated by a German artist, the sculpture was titled The Mourning Mother of Nagasaki. The Volksbund defended its choice by drawing parallels with American-Japanese reconciliation, hoping to echo that dynamic in a German-Russian context. Russian partners, however, objected to the sculpture on the grounds that it risked presenting the buried German soldiers as innocent victims and potentially heroifying them. The proposal sparked considerable controversy within the local community. Ultimately, a compromise was reached: rather than being installed in the cemetery itself, the sculpture was relocated to the adjacent Peace Park, where it still stands today.

Controversies such as those surrounding Sologubovka are far from unusual in Eastern Europe. Volksbund representatives and local Russian observers alike have noted that Soviet commemorative practices traditionally emphasized collective sacrifice rather than individual graves. Mass graves and monumental memorials dedicated to victory were common, reflecting a different cultural approach to mourning the war dead. When German cemeteries began appearing in the region, featuring individual graves for family visits, carefully maintained greenery, and significant attention to landscape design, some Russians expressed disappointment that their own soldiers had not received similar treatment. This sentiment was particularly striking given that the Soviet Union had both defeated and suffered immensely at the hands of the Nazi regime.

The Sologubovka project therefore illustrates two intertwined realities. First, it demonstrates the willingness of former enemies to cooperate in commemorating their dead. Second, it highlights the profound complexity of undertaking such efforts in regions where the memory of German violence remains deeply embedded in collective consciousness. This tension functions as a leitmotif throughout many of the Volksbund’s activities in Eastern Europe. The controversies surrounding these projects reflect the difficulties faced by a nation attempting to commemorate its dead in territories that experienced immense suffering under its occupation. Despite these challenges, the scale of the effort remains considerable: today, the Volksbund manages over 400 German cemeteries across Eastern Europe. The most recent Russian cemetery was inaugurated in 2013, and the organization continues to explore the possibility of further projects in the region.

Controversies surrounding the Volksbund

It is difficult to ignore the historical controversies associated with the Volksbund. The organization originated after the First World War, and its activities during the interwar years were closely tied to right-wing ideology and the heroification of German war dead in service of nationalist narratives. According to historian Susanne Brandt, “During the interwar years, some sites (e.g. Langemark cemetery in Belgium) were purposefully exploited in order to idealize the greatness of the victims and their readiness to sacrifice themselves, to prepare a new war, and to deny military defeat.” The ideological orientation of the organization was further reflected in its membership. Many participants in the Volksbund during this period were described as “disenchanted soldiers and right-wing radical groups, who espoused the stab-in-the-back myth.” The origins of the Volksbund are therefore intertwined with nationalist radicalism and revisionist memory politics, a legacy that complicates its later role in managing the burial of German war dead after the Second World War.

In 1952, the Volksbund officially received approval from the Allied authorities to install World War II memorials within Germany itself. The individuals responsible for carrying out this work were often veterans of the conflict, including former soldiers and, in some cases, members of the SS. Some historians, including David Livingstone, argue that while the Volksbund played an important role in closing wounds for German families by repatriating and burying their relatives, the organization’s connections to right-wing patriotic networks simultaneously risked reopening wounds for victims of the Nazi regime. Although the Volksbund underwent a process of denazification after the war, these efforts were often inconsistent. The urgency surrounding the burial of the dead created conditions in which screening was limited, and some members of the organization had previously been fervent Nazi supporters. Wilhelm Lübotter, for example, served as a Volksbund architect and was commissioned by the British occupation authorities in 1945 to design a victims’ monument at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Yet Lübotter had earlier been a Nazi supporter who designed Heinrich Himmler’s Saxon’s Grove, an SS gathering site located only a few miles from Bergen. Such cases reveal the conflicts of interest that permeated the early postwar activities of the Volksbund and suggest that the organization’s humanitarian work was not entirely detached from its ideological past.

The Volksbund has also faced criticism for its tendency to frame all war dead within a single moral category. As previously noted, the 1952 special law for war graves groups together “Nazi victims, meaning Jewish concentration camp prisoners, political opponents, forced laborers, and soldiers.” In practice, the Volksbund has taken responsibility for maintaining the graves of civilians, German soldiers, and victims of genocide alike. This arrangement raises important ethical questions, as the same institution that buries the perpetrators of wartime violence also claims responsibility for commemorating their victims. The organization frequently operates within a narrative of collective “war victims,” employing a vocabulary centered on “peace” and “remembrance” as universal concepts. While such language may facilitate reconciliation for some parties, it can also obscure the profound asymmetries that defined the wartime relationship between perpetrators and victims.

Over time, the Volksbund has repositioned itself as a semi-private charitable organization dedicated to education, reconciliation, and peace. Nevertheless, the tensions embedded in its history illustrate how difficult it is to separate humanitarian burial practices from the political and moral questions surrounding the legacy of the Third Reich. The Volksbund’s activities demonstrate how unresolved historical issues can sometimes be subsumed within broader narratives of reconciliation rather than fully confronted. In this sense, the controversies surrounding the organization reveal the broader challenge at the heart of burying the enemy: the burial site itself can become a space where questions of responsibility, memory, and moral hierarchy remain unsettled.

The Volksbund and memory

The work of memorialization and commemoration is intrinsically linked to popular understandings of the past. As the leading entity responsible for caring for the German war dead, as well as for organizing youth exchanges and commemorative events, the Volksbund occupies an influential position in shaping the public memory of World War II in Germany. This responsibility is significant given that German memory of the war remains a deeply contested field. Much of the philosophy guiding the Volksbund’s activities stems from the idea that death functions as a universal equalizer. Within this framework, the fact of death itself becomes the central element of commemoration, rather than the political or moral context in which that death occurred.

This perspective has contributed to a broader trend in German collective memory in which private mourning for the war dead acquires a public dimension. In this context, German soldiers are sometimes framed as victims of the war, occasionally in ways that place them symbolically alongside displaced, disenfranchised, abused and murdered victims of the conflict. Visitors to German war cemeteries outside Germany, for example, are often encouraged to view the soldiers buried there as “brothers, fathers, and sons.” Such language emphasizes the human loss experienced by families and communities while largely setting aside the ideological commitments or actions of those who served the Nazi regime. In this sense, the Volksbund’s commemorative practices focus on the fact of death itself rather than on the historical circumstances surrounding that death, suggesting that the soldiers, through dying, become victims in their own right.

Some cemeteries have attempted to address this tension by including contextual information about the genocidal regime for which these soldiers fought, thereby resisting interpretations that might neutralize or absolve their actions. Notably, such contextualization is often introduced by external actors, such as Jewish organizations, rather than by the Volksbund itself. As a result, critics have argued that the organization risks “blurring the lines” between victims and perpetrators through its commemorative language and spatial practices.

These discourses can contribute to broader narratives in which German civilians are framed as “victims of global circumstances,” implicitly placing their suffering on a level comparable to that of those persecuted by the Third Reich. Such interpretations carry important ideological implications. In extreme cases, they echo elements of the “stab-in-the-back” mythology that emerged after the First World War, which claimed that Germany’s defeat resulted not from military failure but from internal betrayal. Narratives that minimize or diffuse responsibility risk reinforcing these historical patterns of deflection. This concern is particularly relevant in the present context, as Nazi-sympathizing tendencies have been observed in several groups in recent years, including within Germany itself.

The term “Nazi” continues to evoke a powerful and deeply negative memory of the regime’s crimes. The vast body of museums, literature, films, and other forms of public memory dedicated to the atrocities of the Third Reich demonstrates that educational and commemorative efforts have largely succeeded in foregrounding the experiences of the regime’s victims. Yet tensions remain when the focus shifts to the physical landscapes of burial for German soldiers. Cemeteries are inherently spaces of mourning and respect, and the line between commemoration and reverence can become difficult to maintain when the dead include both perpetrators and victims of the same conflict. The activities of the Volksbund illustrate how burial sites themselves can become arenas in which these tensions are negotiated, highlighting the persistent challenge of commemorating the German war dead without obscuring the moral asymmetries of the war they fought.

Conclusion

The vast number of bodies left across Europe at the end of the Second World War required systematic organization, both to prevent disease and to ensure proper burial. The Volksbund emerged in response to this problem, taking on the task of locating, exhuming, and reburying German war dead abroad. Yet in postwar Germany, mourning could not occur collectively or nationally. Because of Germany’s responsibility for Nazi crimes, grief remained largely private. The desire of families to know the fate of their relatives, however, created a powerful demand for institutions capable of managing the dead. Operating within the tensions of denazification, reeducation, and collective guilt, the Volksbund became an intermediary between personal mourning and international diplomacy. Its work required cooperation with former enemy states and therefore contributed, often pragmatically, to postwar reconstruction and the normalization of international relations.

At the same time, the organization’s activities reveal the political complexities of commemorating the defeated. Efforts to honor the German war dead inevitably intersected with questions of responsibility, victimhood, and historical memory. The history of the Volksbund therefore demonstrates that burial and commemoration are never purely humanitarian acts; they are also shaped by the power structures and moral consequences of the conflict that produced the dead.

Examining these tensions is essential for understanding how societies manage the aftermath of mass violence. As future conflicts inevitably produce similar challenges, the experience of the Volksbund illustrates both the necessity of recovering and burying the dead and the importance of approaching such efforts with careful attention to historical responsibility and the protection of victims.

Although this paper was originally written in 2023, debates surrounding the burial and commemoration of German war dead have continued to evolve in the years since. Recent reporting in 2025 and early 2026 has highlighted renewed controversies surrounding the discovery, exhumation, and reburial of Nazi-era remains in Germany and across Europe, as well as public debates over the role of institutions such as the Volksbund in managing these sites. Furthermore, the exhumation and reburial of remains in several areas of Eastern Europe has come to a halt in the recent intensification of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. These discussions underscore that the questions explored in this paper, about commemoration, responsibility, and the ethical framing of burial practices, are not confined to the immediate postwar period but remain part of an ongoing negotiation of historical memory in the present.

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