Germans, Poles join in bid to lift plane
Source: Agencies |
April 14, 2012, Saturday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
ONE March day in the last weeks of World War II, more than 70 German children squeezed into a plane designed for 14 hoping to be flown to safety from the advancing Soviet tanks in northeastern Nazi Germany.
Minutes after takeoff the plane dived into an icy lake, killing everyone on board. Nearly 70 years later, former war foes Germany and Poland are joining forces to try to raise the wreck from Resko Przymorskie in western Poland.
Zdzislaw Matusewicz, mayor of the Polish town of Trzebiatow, is working with Germany's War Graves Commission to retrieve the remains of the mostly unidentified children and four crew from what is known in Germany as Kamper See and bury them in a nearby war cemetery.
Very few of the children's identities are known but since the project began, some people have come forward, hoping to obtain details about family members who went missing without a trace in the chaotic last months of the war.
Both sides say the project is an important symbol of how far Poles and Germans have come in putting behind them a Nazi occupation that left 6 million Poles dead, many in mass civilian executions or extermination camps such as Auschwitz.
Minutes after takeoff the plane dived into an icy lake, killing everyone on board. Nearly 70 years later, former war foes Germany and Poland are joining forces to try to raise the wreck from Resko Przymorskie in western Poland.
Zdzislaw Matusewicz, mayor of the Polish town of Trzebiatow, is working with Germany's War Graves Commission to retrieve the remains of the mostly unidentified children and four crew from what is known in Germany as Kamper See and bury them in a nearby war cemetery.
Very few of the children's identities are known but since the project began, some people have come forward, hoping to obtain details about family members who went missing without a trace in the chaotic last months of the war.
Both sides say the project is an important symbol of how far Poles and Germans have come in putting behind them a Nazi occupation that left 6 million Poles dead, many in mass civilian executions or extermination camps such as Auschwitz.
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