East Germans Find 2nd Mass Grave of WWII Internees

A man who says he saw Soviet troops shoot scores of interned Germans after World War II has helped to uncover their mass grave in a forest near Berlin.

East German officials said Tuesday that Kurt Mueller, now 60, led them to the grave near the village of Schmachtenhagen that could contain as many as 400 bodies. It was the second mass grave exposed in recent days in East Germany.

“Mueller told us that no one wanted to know about it before but that now it was time to bring it all to light,” local government official Heinz Erdmann said.

The shootings took place close to the infamous Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, which Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s troops turned into an internment camp for Germans they suspected of being Nazis in 1945.

Such disclosures would have been unthinkable under East Germany’s former hard-line Communist leadership, installed by Stalin in 1945 and ousted last year in a peaceful revolution.

Mueller, an East German, told his story to the authorities about three weeks ago. Preliminary digging initially revealed nothing.

“The 11th excavation turned up bones and skeletons,” said Erdmann, deputy chairman of the Oranienburg regional government, which is responsible for Schmachtenhagen. “We don’t know how many died. Mueller said it could have been 100, 200, 300 or 400.”

More extensive excavations will be continued.

On Saturday, East German media reported the existence of a mass grave near the northern town of Neubrandenburg containing layer upon layer of skeletons of people who died at a nearby Soviet internment camp.