Hubert Babor

“They tore down a lot of the houses around here back in the 1950s so that nobody could hide in there. The houses were strewn all over the place, all the way to the border, lone settlements and so on, so they tore everything down… little chapels… everything… so that nobody could hide there. Some of the older demolition workers are still alive, but they won’t tell you the truth, not them.”

“Suddenly one of them screamed that he found a bone. At first we thought it was a deer bone and paid no attention. They went on digging and unearthed a human skull; eventually they found quite a lot of bones and I think three military dog tags, about the size of an egg with numbers on them. All soldiers used to carry those so they could be identified if killed. Then we found out that they were German soldiers. There were gas masks alongside, still in those tin cans. There were no weapons, just clothes residues, all rotten. So we buried it all in the forest. Nobody cared at the time, those were Nazi soldiers… Over time we found that US soldiers encountered young Nazis, Hitlerjugend, the fanatics in the area… They opened fire on the Americans; they fought back and shot them all dead, and then they buried them right there.”