Bonedigger has been finding the WWII fallen for 43 years
HAMMER, Germany -- The shallow hole widens and a man comes together like a puzzle: hips, fingers, ribs, vertebrae, teeth and crushed skull. A boot surfaces along with a rusted bullet clip. But no dog tags, no wedding ring, nothing to give him a name, so the bones go into a box where they are marked with a number written in white chalk: 1,968...
[Erwin] Kowalke [is] a volunteer who has excavated the remains of 20,000 people, most of them German and Russian soldiers killed in fighting as Berlin collapsed toward defeat in the final days of April 1945.
The dead are hidden in this loamy earth, but they are his, and with quiet obsession he aims to find them, even if there are 20,000 more scattered beyond the windshield of his white station wagon, which bounces and swerves down forgotten country roads.
"People tell me to just let the bones sleep in the woods," said Kowalke, a member of the German War Graves Assn. who has been searching for skeletons for 43 years.
Read entire article at Los Angeles Times
[Erwin] Kowalke [is] a volunteer who has excavated the remains of 20,000 people, most of them German and Russian soldiers killed in fighting as Berlin collapsed toward defeat in the final days of April 1945.
The dead are hidden in this loamy earth, but they are his, and with quiet obsession he aims to find them, even if there are 20,000 more scattered beyond the windshield of his white station wagon, which bounces and swerves down forgotten country roads.
"People tell me to just let the bones sleep in the woods," said Kowalke, a member of the German War Graves Assn. who has been searching for skeletons for 43 years.