Mapping the Landscape of the Dead

Long before the U.S. Army set foot on German territory the Army Air Forces had been bombarding the Reich from air.

The U.S. occupied or maintained access to much of western Europe, where the U.S. Army suffered the majority of its losses, but the dimensions of the air war and the German POW camp system meant that many U.S. airmen were lost in territory that would fall behind the Iron Curtain.

To this day there are still over 400 U.S. service members, mostly airmen, missing in former East Germany, but perhaps what is most striking is that despite the numerous obstacles U.S. graves registration teams recovered the remains of over 3,000 U.S. service members during the tenuous early Cold War years.

The casualties from a 24 February 1944 bombing raid on the Gotha provide an instructive example of the different phases of graves registration efforts in 1945, 1947-8, and the early 1950s.

From the cemetery in Bad Salzungen, the U.S. Army disinterred the remains of six airmen from four different aircrews all lost on 24 February 1944. The Bad Salzungen exhumations illuminate some of the challenges with the incomplete nature of the records from the 1945. 

It is only from the captured German records, not the U.S. records, that historians learn that 6 U.S. airmen had been buried in graves 1 through 6 in the community cemetery in Bad Salzungen. The U.S. reports record the recoveries of those 6 airmen; however, the German records show that grave 7 also contained U.S. remains. For some unknown reason, the U.S. Army did not exhume that grave in 1945 nor make note of it.

When U.S. forces withdrew from the Soviet occupied zone in mid-July 1945, there were still some 50 airmen from the Gotha raid that had not yet been recovered from Thüringen, not to mention thousands deeper in the East Germany.

In the meantime, investigators began compiling case information.

Gotha was outside the locales designated for investigation and recovery in 1946 so fieldwork could not advance these cases until the following year. Thüringen had been a sensitive area due to the presence of uranium mines that were being exploited by the Soviets.

In the fall 1947, U.S. graves registration teams finally regained access to the area. In October 1947, AGRC exhumed remains from cemeteries in Tiefenort (6 from MACR 2940 and 1 from 2939), Vacha (5 airmen, MACR 2943, a sixth buried just of the Hessen border in Soisdorf), Pferdsdorf near Vacha (5 MACR 2922) and one from Ruhla, who had not been recovered in the hasty 1945 operations

In February 1947, AGRC received a report from a local priest in Brotterode of a grave in the forest associated with another crash from the 24 February 1944 raid. The field grave in the Steinbacher Flur from a local priest, and in February 1948, graves registration teams were allowed to investigate. A local forester assisted them in locating the graves in the forest and they recovered twenty dead from three different aircraft crashes from isolated graves in the forests of Brotterode.

Another example that is useful for examining the trials and tribulations of graves registration teams in the Soviet zone are the crash near the Alt Lönnewitz air field. During the war, Alt Lönnewitz was a Luftwaffe base. In the summer 1944, a B-17 crashed just south of the airfield. Three of its crew members died in the crash and were buried by prisoners in the Schmerkendorf POW cemetery. A fourth crew member who bailed out died of gunshot wounds in the hospital at Torgau. German shoot-down report KU 2031 documented the downed aircraft and its crew in detail, which would later benefit the graves registration teams working this case.

In April 1945, only a few weeks before the end of the war, three U.S. fighter aircraft, piloted by 1st Lt Donald Beals, 1st Lt Richard Horrigan, and 2d Lt Robert Jarrell also crashed near the Alt Lönnewitz airfield. There were no reports of the fate of their remains. At the end of the war, the German reporting system had largely broken down, so no shoot-down reports were filed.

The Alt Lönnewitz airfield lay less than ten miles due east of Torgau and the Elbe River but, unlike Thüringen, it was outside the reach of U.S. troops in 1945

When graves registration operations resumed in 1946, the Soviets were hesitant to allow the Americans near Alt Lönnewitz. After the war, the base was requisitioned by the Soviets and they did not want Americans in the vicinity as they moved their newest fighter aircraft to the base. Another sensitive area nearby was the Speziallager. During the war, the camp had been designated Stalag IV B, a POW camp that held allied prisoners but after the war, the Soviets began using it for German prisoners.

In the summer 1947, the Soviets briefly allowed AGRC teams to investigate in the area but their movements were restricted. Using the German records, the AGRC teams were able to recover the remains of the bomber crew. On 18 and 21 June 1948, a graves registration team investigated Lonnewitz for information on the two fighter crashes. However, they ran into difficulties with Soviets when they realized that they needed to go to Alt Lönnewitz, some 15 miles from Lonnewitz (Oschatz). The Soviets refused their request to change the itinerary. A few days later, the Soviets blockaded Berlin which undoubtedly impacted the investigations in Saxony and the rest of the Soviet occupied zone

U.S-Soviet tensions came to a head when the Soviets blockaded Berlin from western ground access beginning on 24 June 1948. The blockade undoubtedly disrupted graves registration operations, but it is notable that they continued. The Soviets still permitted American access to search for the fallen.