COLUMN ONE : A Crusader Hunts for Germany’s War Dead : Identifying the remains of those killed in the last days of World War II is Gerald Ramm’s passion. It raises hackles in the east, where mourning was discouraged.

Perhaps you have to have grown up in the blinkered realm of the Eastern Bloc to regard the act of pulling weeds the way Gerald Ramm does: as “a political act.”

One summer day in 1987, Ramm appeared in the churchyard of this, his home village in what was then still East Germany, and attacked the chest-high tangle of nettles and goldenrod in the corner where he knew the bodies of German soldiers had been treated with no tenderness at the end of World War II.

“The priest came out and asked, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Ramm recalls. “I tried to explain to him that there are certain international laws that call on people to take care of the graves of soldiers. The priest said: ‘Oh, you don’t have to take that too seriously. It all happened 40 years ago, and besides, it’s better for these graves to disappear. Otherwise they could become shrines for cultists.’ ”

Ramm persisted at what he viewed as a work of mercy. He is, as it happens, a man driven by mysterious forces when it comes to caring for remains of Germany’s war dead. So since the fall of the Berlin Wall, he has gone into the funeral business.

He now is one of just three people in all Germany allowed to go looking for the hundreds of thousands of bodies still believed to be lying unmarked where they fell 50 years ago, somewhere in the soil of eastern Germany.

His work--which tells much about how the two sides in the once divided Germany have dealt with the unhappy legacy of World War II--is, in many ways, this country’s counterpart to the search for America’s Vietnam-era MIAs.

Searching for remains, digging them up and trying to identify them are tasks that few would want, particularly in Germany, where any unusual interest in Wehrmacht soldiers is easily interpreted as Nazi revivalism. Ramm has attracted more than his share of criticism, even in the relatively open political climate of today’s united Germany.

In the more limited east, Ramm’s eccentric cast of mind has been particularly unwelcome. By the time he went to his laboratory job the morning after his churchyard visit--he was working as a plastics research engineer at the time--his boss had already gotten wind of his impolitic activities. He was sharply reprimanded.

That was the way it was in East Germany. Germany’s Nazi past--and the many thousands of decaying war skeletons lying open to the elements all over the landscape--constituted a forbidden subject.

Some East Germans tried to make simple graves for the dead, usually an unmarked wooden cross with a coal-scuttle “helmet” slung across the top. But the government razed these monuments, preferring to build museums commemorating the Soviet “liberation” of fascist Germany.

The Germans who died in the last, lunatic battles of the spring of 1945--hapless adolescent conscripts, Nazi die-hards or frantic women with babes in arms fleeing Red Army rape squads--all were lumped together and written off as war criminals.

“The whole subject of World War II [in East Germany] was focused solely on ‘liberation,’ ” says Ramm, offering a tour of the lands around Woltersdorf, a place of much politically induced sorrow, even today.

“When you walked around here, you would see that every little village had a Soviet obelisk or a Soviet graveyard, but you wouldn’t find a trace of the German soldiers. Every schoolchild knew where Marx and Lenin were buried, but nobody knew where his own grandfather had died during the war. To me, this was a contradiction.”

Not so in the west. In one of the great disharmonies of postwar history, the Germans on the other side of the mined border were granted the freedom to struggle to come to terms with what their fathers, husbands, uncles and brothers had wrought.

Rituals in West

West Germans buried their dead, tended the graves, formed veterans clubs, talked, mourned and sometimes--after enough time had passed to ease the shame--told their children about their own roles in the Third Reich.

It was a slow business, certainly a painful one, and a serious test of people’s emotive range. But it was probably therapeutic for West German society.

“Only by working through its past is a people able to learn from its history, to break its compulsion to repeat its mistakes and to bring about necessary social changes,” wrote psychoanalyst Margarete Mitscherlich in an afterword to her famous critique of West German postwar society, “The Inability to Mourn.”

Ramm thinks Mitscherlich’s message applies equally to the east, where people in very great numbers knew what it was like to be wounded and homeless, robbed of their families forever and hungry for some personal closure to Hitler’s war.

“It was really depressing,” he says.

Ramm, 31, an amateur archeologist, had a boyhood obsession with wresting treasures from the earth that nearly drove his family mad. As a preschooler, he once carried home a live potato-masher grenade, crying: “Mommy! Look at the big pendulum I found!”

Luckily for him, he hasn’t had to suppress his passion forever. For him, the end of communism opened vast new fields of opportunity: soldiers’ bones to unearth, war cemeteries to build, last respects to pay, remains to analyze, secrets to puzzle out and, he believes, a great wrong to set right.

Official Permission

Since 1991, Ramm has had his hard-won official permission to go looking for Germany’s war dead, thought to be particularly numerous in the area around Woltersdorf. The village lies along the route taken by millions of German civilians as they streamed out of present-day Poland in hopes of escaping the Red Army. It also stood directly in the Soviets’ path as they made their final push on Berlin.

Where to find those who died in these last, desperate surges of humanity, passing from woe to woe across the most disordered place on Earth?

Ramm takes his clues from the elderly veterans he meets at the funerals he directs, men now happy to break their years of enforced silence. They tell him where their long-lost buddies were last seen, and then Ramm--usually accompanied by a small crew of army engineers and armed with a metal detector--sets out to find the remains.

For Ramm, this grim job has become a crusade: Dig up as many of these lost thousands as he can before grave robbers get to them. Learn what there is to be known from their bones and their rotting field gear. Document his discoveries. Send word of his findings to the huge MIA registry that the German government still maintains in an old munitions factory on the north side of Berlin.

Peter Gerhardt, the registry’s director, says an estimated 1.2 million people still are unaccounted for 50 years after the war. Many of them were shipped off as POWs to the former Soviet Union and presumed lost forever. The paperwork on all these MIA reports is voluminous enough to fill 40 trains, each with 80 boxcars.

Besides helping to solve MIA cases, Ramm has written several small-press books of regional wartime history, filled with intriguing slices of the lives of the ordinary German soldiers whose bones, equipment and diaries he finds.

But his real mission is to dig them graves and, by doing so, to help former East Germans to mourn.

“Now nearly 50 years of silence has been broken in our side of Germany,” the slender young undertaker says with apparent satisfaction.

In his zeal to provide proper burials for eastern Germany’s war dead, Ramm enjoys the solid backing of international law. Article 77 of the Geneva Convention calls on signatory nations to document the disposition of all war dead on their soil and to maintain proper cemeteries for them. East Germany paid grudging lip service to this rule by keeping a single large war cemetery near the town of Halbe, not far from Woltersdorf.

But traces of the blanket self-condemnation induced by four decades of communism hang on.

Across the former East Germany, there are plenty of people who still believe that what Ramm is doing is wicked--that any German in 1945 was a Nazi, plain and simple, whose death provided no occasion for tears, much less a formal reburial under a chiseled gravestone.

Some area politicians have tried to ban Ramm’s volumes of war history. Newspaper reviewers say he has strayed unwholesomely close to his subject, the Hitler-era Germans. Villagers have at times refused to let him rebury in their graveyards the remains he finds. One columnist recently claimed that the “intensity of the attacks” on Ramm had convinced him to emigrate. Ramm says this is untrue.

Controversy in East

One monograph in particular, Ramm’s “Woltersdorf: A Village in the Third Reich,” has brought eastern Germans out to their town halls to argue the merits of Ramm’s lonely office for the dead. Many are upset because the book reprints excerpts from Wehrmacht soldiers’ letters and diaries, without any accompanying denunciations.

“Where [in the book] are the names of the former Jewish citizens of Woltersdorf, who disappeared between 1938 and 1944?” demanded one angry reader, Detlef Haeuser, in a long exchange of letters to the local newspaper.

But other locals have come to Ramm’s defense, and the undertaker himself remains anything but repentant.

“If a soldier writes home, ‘I think it’s wonderful to kill Jews,’ why shouldn’t I publish this?” he says. “It is a document, a mirror of the Zeitgeist , the spirit of the time. I think we need to know about what happened, particularly the atrocities.”

In the airless little museum Ramm maintains in the basement of an old people’s home in Woltersdorf, he argues that there was a vast difference in spirit between, say, a bloodthirsty concentration camp guard and the old man whose bones he recently dug up--a pensioner drafted into Hitler’s pathetic Volkssturm in the very last weeks of the war.

The Volkssturm was made up mostly of teen-agers and elderly men previously deemed unfit for combat, who went forth into battle armed only with a ludicrous weapon called a Panzerfaust that could fire just one shot before it disintegrated.

“They were told it would penetrate tank armor,” says Ramm, holding up the dead man’s Panzerfaust , which looks a bit like an oversize oboe. Next to its place in Ramm’s exhibit is the man’s helmet, vintage World War I--for he was a veteran of the Great War before being drafted to fight for Hitler--with a gaping hole in the back where the fatal round made its exit. The Russian bullet presumably went in through the man’s face.

“No Frenchman feels guilty today about the things Napoleon did,” Ramm says, setting down the Panzerfaust . “No Russian feels personally guilty about what Stalin did. I refuse to hang my head about the things that happened in my grandfathers’ time. I just want to know what they were.”

Far more damaging to Ramm’s project than the complaints of his political enemies are the clandestine doings of a new presence in post-Communist eastern Germany: international dealers in war memorabilia.

Collectors, it turns out, are wise to what’s lying in the sandy soil of the former East. Even though unauthorized digging is verboten here, they will pay hundreds of dollars for a single Nazi medal, depending on the unit it came from and the condition in which it was found.

“It’s really a problem,” says Joerg Mueckler, director of the Brandenburg office of the Federal Assn. for the Maintenance of German War Graves. “On some weekends, there are more than a hundred people out in the forest around Halbe, searching with metal detectors.”

Mueckler’s association, a volunteers club that does just what its name suggests, was active and well organized in West Germany throughout the Cold War. Though it is only just getting started in the former East, it was the association that gave Ramm the training he needed to identify skeletons and that provides his organizational backing.

“An illegal gravedigger can get 600 marks [$425] for a good piece, like a Waffen SS decoration,” says Mueckler. “He’ll take it away and leave the bones scattered around on the ground, so that nobody can identify the person anymore.”

And positive identifications are much desired, MIA registrar Gerhardt says, because they can resolve long-outstanding inheritance questions, or help an elderly war widow secure a bigger pension than she could get without a husband’s official death certificate.

Legal Ramifications

In some cases, Gerhardt says, new identifications can even trigger or resolve lawsuits.

“Especially now, what with all these real estate restitution claims coming in the wake of German unification, it’s really very important to know a person’s exact death date,” he says.

The chance that he might be of help in resolving such a legal battle certainly provides part of Ramm’s motivation. But it is really one personal experience, more than anything, that has pushed him down this odd walk in life.

It all started with a trip he made with his grandparents as a boy. Out of this excursion, he says, came one of his earliest childhood memories: He can see himself standing in an overgrown graveyard, dwarfed by row upon row of plain wooden crosses that seemed to tower above his small frame.

As an adult, he one day asked his parents where this image had come from.

“They said: ‘It was your grandfather’s brother’s grave. He was an intelligence officer, and he was arrested at the end of the war and died on his way to Russia,’ ” Ramm says.

The amateur archeologist, the repressed war historian, was thrilled. Here was something to go see! By this time, Ramm was married and working at the plastics lab. He persuaded his wife to pack up and make a back-to-your-roots pilgrimage with him.

“And do you know what?” he says. “When we got there, we found out that that old graveyard had been turned into a garbage dump. The crosses were all gone. We could even see the bones, sticking up out of the trash.”

That was when Ramm decided that he would devote himself to the peculiar task of tending soldiers’ graves. He went back to Woltersdorf and made his brazen foray into the overgrown churchyard.

“It was a turning point,” he says. “I realized that the grave of my great-uncle had vanished. I couldn’t do anything about it. You can’t turn a dump back into a graveyard again.

“But I knew I could do something for the other people’s graves in my own area. I wanted to do something, because in the end, all that’s left of anybody is a grave. And every human being has an earthly right to one.”