Simple Sign Points to Mass Trauma : East Germany: New site of graves is a testament to history as a lie.

A simple blue sign unveiled the truth at last: “Mass graves of unknown victims,” it read. “Do not walk here.”

The sign, tacked to a spindly tree in the forest of pines and birch just west of this sleepy village, marked the place where victorious Soviet forces executed hundreds of Germans in the months after the end of World War II.

The discovery of human remains was the latest in a series of traumas that freedom has brought the East Germans, a people already unnerved by realization that much of their history has been a lie.

Every child of East Germany has learned of fascist and Nazi atrocities, but only of Soviet good deeds and friendship.

After years of silence and weeks of unsettling rumors, East German soldiers arrived here Friday with shovels and electronic equipment to prove yet another official lie. Three hours was enough to confirm the worst.

“We know 100% there are mass graves there,” said Heinz Erdmann, deputy chairman of the local district government in the nearby town of Oranienburg. “We now want to leave the dead in peace and erected a memorial.”

Erdmann said that evidence from the site, along with preliminary official research and statements from four witnesses who have come forward in recent days, led him to conclude the victims were mainly German, possibly former petty Nazi functionaries denounced by locals, or young people found with weapons in the chaos of Germany’s collapse.

“We’ve made no (exact) estimate, but we feel there are many hundreds here,” Erdmann said.

The victims were almost certainly prisoners from the nearby Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp, one of 11 locations the Soviets used to intern Germans during the first postwar years.

According to a variety of Western official estimates, nearly a quarter of a million people, mainly German men, were interned by the Soviets between 1945 and 1950.

They are believed to include socialists who resisted the fusion of the political left into a single Communist Party that eventually ruled East Germany for 40 years.

Somewhere between 10,000 and 80,000 of those interned are believed to have starved, frozen to death, died of disease or been shot.

East Germans first learned of Soviet atrocities last weekend, when East Berlin newspapers published reports of mass graves on the outskirts of Neubrandenburg, a city about 80 miles north of Berlin. Since then, two other sites, including Schmachtenhagen, have been discovered.

The fact that Germans were interned following the war was certainly no secret.

The victorious Allied powers agreed at the 1945 Potsdam Conference on the right to detain suspected Nazis or others described as “potentially dangerous Germans.”

However, 40 years of unyielding Communist rule in East Germany suppressed the truth of what happened in those Soviet camps.

“All anyone wanted to know about was German-Soviet friendship, and what happened here didn’t fit that,” said Kurt Mueller, a 61-year-old electrician here. “Finally the truth is out.” It was Mueller who persuaded the authorities to search for the graves.

His story and that of this small village of a few hundred families are itself human dramas, dramas of people trapped with their secret and the reality of a Communist dictatorship willing to crush those who disputed its truth.

After living seven years in the shadow of the Sachsenhausen death camp during Hitler’s Third Reich, the people of Schmachtenhagen had learned that silence was the safest course.

Even the initial lonely, questioning voices of those such as Mueller faded with time. The village pretended to forget.

“I was born here, my parents were born here, I wanted to live in this village,” he said during an interview in his small living room. “I didn’t want to have to leave because I kept on about this.”

He said he finally fell silent in the late 1950s when a schoolteacher took him aside one day and told him his children’s future would be jeopardized if he persisted.

Sascha Riek, a 15-year-old village youth, said even his favorite teacher, Frau Ferber, who told him lots of things she shouldn’t have, never mentioned the graves.

Mueller, whose house backs onto the forest, said he was 17 when he returned home after the war in August, 1945, and a friend first showed him the grave.

“He showed me a grave, about 3 meters (just under 10 feet) by 2 meters (just over 6 feet),” Mueller said. “I saw an elbow sticking out.

“We went away, we believed there was nothing we could do. We were afraid. The war had led to so much hate.”

The fear was so great that Erdmann described the four witnesses to the shootings who have so far come forward as “earwitnesses,” rather than eyewitnesses.

“They heard trucks, they heard shooting, but it wasn’t a time when such sounds made you want to go closer,” he said.

Only with the collapse of Erich Honecker’s neo-Stalinist regime late last year did Mueller carefully start again.

Friday, nearly 50 East German army soldiers, working as volunteers from a nearby base, unearthed enough human remains to confirm what most older people here had been unable to forget.