NMA Gerd Presentation british legion

German War Remembrance and the Role of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge

Gerd Knischewski – University of Portsmouth

German memory of the Second World War is inextricably linked to the memory of National Socialism (NS).   Any commemoration is confronted with the problem if, and to what extent, German war memory can be separated from the memory of German expansionism, racial warfare and ultimately the genocide that came to be known as the Holocaust. This also poses the question of what, if any, scope is left for remembering German suffering, that is the memory of Germans as victims of war, flight and expulsion, post-war occupation and division, and finally how these two approaches should be balanced.

Consequently, the memory of the Second World War in general and commemoration of the dead in particular have been, and still are, far from being consensual and uniting in Germany.  Since the late 1970s, public discourses have been dominated by a left-liberal milieu which insists on focusing German war memory on the Holocaust and the role of Germans as its perpetrators.  Despite some ongoing hostile opposition[i], this has led over the years to the development of an extensive memorial landscape.   Indeed the 1980s have been labelled as ‘the decade of NS memorials’.[ii]  

This talk focuses on the role of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, in short Volksbund or VDK (in official German Totengedenken (remembrance of the dead).  The name literally translates as The People’s League for the Maintenance of War Graves.

This talk aims to show that the Volksbund’s wider activities, as reflected in its quarterly membership magazine Stimme & Weg (Voice & Path), its website and the live-broadcast annual memorial event of Volkstrauertag challenge the notion of the Holocaust as the undisputed focus of  WWII memory in the current German memory culture. 

The Volksbund was founded as a private but state-supported war graves commission taking over the maintenance of the German war cemeteries in 1919 after the German defeat in WWI. 

The Volksbund’s World War I cemeteries outside Germany, in particular those built after 1930 and later under the Nazi regime, became criticized because of their ideologically controversial aesthetics. From 1930 onwards, cemeteries were encircled by high, solid walls and named ‘castles for the dead’ (Totenburgen).  These have been variably interpreted as a symbolic continuation of a German military presence, a gesture of solitary defence or a claim to territory in a foreign, hostile environment.[iii]  Even after 1945, the Volksbund continued to use this aesthetic concept, for example in the 1955 Totenburg in El Alamein, Egypt.[iv] 

The first central[v] remembrance ceremony after the end of the First World War was held in 1922 in the parliamentary building in Berlin, the Reichstag. An annual national day of remembrance, Volkstrauertag (the people’s day of mourning) was introduced in 1926[vi].

A political consensus on a national memorial was harder to achieve.  In the end, the state of Prussia decided to build a memorial for the fallen soldiers of Prussia.  In 1931, a design by the architect Heinrich Tessenow was chosen for the purpose.  The memorial became housed in the former Guardhaus (Neue Wache) of the Prussian King and consisted of a large empty room in the middle of which stood an altar-style bloc of granite with a gold and silver wreath of oak leaves on top.  The right-wing opposition, however, dismissed this memorial as too feminine, ‘Jewish’ and not heroic enough.[vii] 

Nazi Germany held on to the memorial but added a Grand Cross behind the granite bloc thus turning it effectively into an altar for the ‘fatherland’. 

Following the unconditional surrender of the German army in 1945, the trauma of total military defeat, the loss of sovereignty and a third of territory in the east, the division in East and West and not least the moral discreditation of Germany as a result of war atrocities and genocide, turned official war remembrance into a difficult matter.  A simple continuation of traditional and established forms of commemoration seemed impossible.  In the early days, any official reference to the heroism of German soldiers, or their sacrifice for a greater good, would have alarmed the Allies, victims of the Nazi regime and an emerging pacifist movement.  However, the rapidly emerging Cold War mellowed the Western Allies’ attitudes.  The military administrations in the Western zones therefore allowed the re-establishment of the Volksbund  in the late 1940s.  The Soviet occupational authorities did not approve of any Volksbund activities, and after the founding of the two German states in 1949, the East-German authorities extended this ban.[viii] 

In 1954, the West German Government (re-) commissioned the Volksbund with the task of maintaining the German war graves cemeteries (Kriegsgräberstätten) abroad.[ix]  For the conduct of its activities, the Volksbund was given some public funding in addition to its own revenues from membership fees, donations and fund raising activities.  

During the early post-war years most West Germans were generally hesitant to accept any notion of ‘collective guilt’ or personal involvement and responsibility and preferred to claim for themselves the status of victims. They felt victimized by the (Western) Allies who had subjected them to carpet bombings during the war, had accepted the brutal expulsion of Germans from their former eastern territories and conducted a de-Nazification process which Germans perceived as ambivalent, unpredictable and unjust.[x]

As the Allies only allowed the building of war memorials in 1952[xi], few new memorials were built in those early years but plaques were added to First World War monuments.  These were dedicated to the fallen soldiers of the Second World War, and often to the civilian victims as well.  However, in the more settled climate of the 1950s and 1960s, war memorials exclusively dedicated to the dead and missing of World War II began to be erected.  These stood mainly in a Christian[xii] iconographic tradition and depicted motives of suffering and mourning. By 1995, there was an estimated number of 35,000-40,000.[xiii]  At the same time, this focus on German suffering was highly political; for example, a wall relief in a central location near Munich City Hall dating back to 1954, reminds to this day of the German prisoners of war who were then still being kept in captivity in the Soviet Union.[xiv] 

Arguably, the quantity of German war and civilian casualties, losses and hardship resulted in an inability ‘to make the leap from thinking about their own suffering to connecting it with the broader context of Nazism, genocide and war, and their own responsibility for these’.[xv]  Such a psychological approach which stresses the deep traumatization of Germans and their suffering as victims mirrors the feelings that initially dominated among the Germans themselves and which currently experience a popular revival.  However, it negates that this unconscious inability – or deliberate reluctance – to confront Germany’s past was embedded in the context of the Cold War in which the continuation of anti-communist policies allowed the West Germans to feel to a certain degree exculpated.

The division of Germany into two states in 1949 gave German war remembrance an additional and unique dimension. Regained political sovereignty and the re-installation of armed forces in 1955 linked war commemoration as a ritualistic addressing of the past to a necessity of the present, i.e. that of creating legitimacy for the newly formed armies, despite the involvement of former Wehrmacht personnel.  The ideological bloc-confrontation of West and East Germany helped West Germany to shift blame for the expulsions from the eastern territories[xvi] from the Western Allies entirely onto the Soviet Union and its Eastern European bloc allies.  

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) managed to turn the military defeat of Germany into a historic victory for itself as, with the help of the Soviet Union, Nazism – or Fascism, as was the preferred term – had been forever eradicated from East German soil.  This interpretation provided a much more favourable justification for its armed forces.  Not only was the GDR spared the far-reaching cultural revolution in the aftermath of the 1968s students’ rebellion which succeeded in establishing post-nationalism and pacifism as important features of the West-German political culture. 

From 1960 onwards the GDR continued to use the Neue Wache building, which was located in the eastern sector of Berlin, for commemorative purposes.  The memorial became dedicated ‘To the Victims of Fascism and Militarism’ and was redesigned in 1969.  It now deployed a glass cube containing an eternal flame and the GDR code of arms, and the ashes of an unknown soldier and an unknown resistance fighter were buried underneath memorial slabs in the ground. 

Given the history of abuse of national symbols, the Federal Republic of Germany’s political culture initially developed a kind of ‘symbolic minimalism’[xvii].  Owing to the loss of the Neue Wache building to the GDR, West German officials had to resort to provisional memorials in its equally provisional capital Bonn for wreath laying ceremonies. On 17^th June 1964, a bronze plaque on a memorial stone near Bonn University was inaugurated by the Federal Chancellor and the Lord Mayor of West-Berlin.  Its dedication read ‘To the Victims of War and Tyranny’. 

Following demands of the foreign ministry’s protocol for a more representative memorial of honour (Ehrenmal) – a term showing some continuity with the memorial practices of WWI and which was only dropped in the 1980s –, the then Federal President Carstens (CDU) decided single-handedly in 1980 to move the memorial stone to Bonn northern cemetery and to put it in front of a Grand Cross made of ‘German oak’.[xviii]  In the context of plans for a new parliamentary building in Bonn, the Volksbund in 1982 suggested the erection of a new war memorial covering some 40,000 square metres with a floating crown of thorns as its centre-piece which would have effectively turned the ‘dead of the German people’ into martyrs, likening their sacrifice to that of Christ.[xix]

However, the political context of the early 1980s was considerably different from that of the 1950s and 1960s: the new Ost- und Deutschlandpolitik, initiated by the Social Democratic Chancellor Brandt, had led to a climate of détente towards the East.  In the 1968 student movement, a new generation had challenged the silencing of the Nazi past.  Brandt’s 1970 historic genuflection in front of the monument for the victims of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto had been a public symbolic admission of German guilt and responsibility for the Jewish genocide in front of a world audience.  The 1979 broadcast of the American TV series Holocaust had led to countless grassroots initiatives researching local histories of oppression and resistance under the Nazis.  In the early 1980s, the Anti-NATO Friedensbewegung (peace movement) became the biggest ever grassroots movement in the history of post-war Germany.    

Therefore, although a conservative-led government had resumed power in 1982, the Volksbund’s memorial proposal for Bonn did not resonate with the political climate of the time at all.  In parliament, it was fiercely rejected by the opposition parties of the time, the Social Democrats and the Greens.  

However, this opposition had only had a delaying effect. The unification of the two German states in 1990 gave Chancellor Kohl the opportunity to establish, again single-handedly, a war memorial in Berlin.  This was to be housed in the Neue Wache building which had been inherited from the GDR.   

The artistic design for the memorial chosen by Kohl stands in the representational art tradition of many First World War memorials (also favoured by the Volksbund).  The dedication ‘To the Victims of War and Tyranny’, in combination with the leitmotif of the opening ceremony, according to which ‘death has erased all differences’, led to tumultuous protests on its inauguration on Volkstrauertag in November 1993.  The figurative centrepiece of the memorial, an enormously inflated version of the sculpture ‘mother with dead son’ by the artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) caused further controversy.  The symbol of a mother grieving for her fallen son is not only an exclusive reference to Christian iconography but also too obviously does not depict the specific horrors of World War II, implemented by a criminal regime that in its racial hatred spared neither women nor children.[xx]

German Unification has obviously also had an impact on the activities of the Volksbund.  In addition to helping relatives, veterans or other interested parties organizing visits to graves, in particular on anniversary dates or, it has since 1990 inaugurated a number of new war cemeteries in Central and Eastern Europe.  Educational seminars in form of international youths camps in Germany and 15 countries abroad, often held in its own buildings, always include maintenance work on graves.   For some 10 or 15 years, the educational youth programme has been increasingly supplemented by educational services for schools, including the provision of learning materials for teachers.

Overall, the focus of war cemetery activities, and with it the financial resources involved, has shifted towards Central and Eastern Europe.  After occasionally quite lengthy and difficult negotiations, a series of bilateral agreements was signed which allow the Volksbund to locate, identify and rebury German soldiers in new, fewer and larger cemeteries. The sheer quantity of completed work is impressive, as is its appeal to supporters.  In the early 2000s, the Volksbund had some 260,000 fee-paying members but at least three times as many sponsors[xxi]. It publishes the quarterly magazine Stimme & Weg for its members and sponsors, and occasional brochures and videos for self-promotional and educational purposes.  Funding of the wide range of activities remains a pressing problem.  The quarterly magazine has a regular section asking readers to consider making donations in their will. 

The Volksbund is the main or joint organizer of a multitude of local, regional and national annual commemorative acts on Volkstrauertag (Remembrance Day)[xxii], which was first re-introduced in West Germany on a national level in 1950 under the auspices of the Volksbund.  The annual commemorative ceremony was now taking place in the West German parliament building in Bonn on a Sunday in November.  Since then, Volkstrauertag has been a national holiday with the purpose of honouring the dead of two world wars and, since the early 1960s, the ‘victims of tyranny’.  Public ceremonies entail wreath laying, speeches and church services at federal, regional and local levels.

Since unification and with the reinstallation of Berlin as the German capital, the central festive act has been held in Berlin, since 1999 in the Reichstag building.  The live-broadcast ceremony has developed a highly ritualized pattern.  There is normally a short welcoming speech from the Speaker of the Lower House of the German parliament, and the main speech is normally held by a representative of one of the five constitutional bodies, or occasionally an international guest-speaker, who gives the event their individual theme.  The speeches are framed by a cultural programme including classical music and a performance by secondary-school students who recite from texts such as war poems or letters from soldiers.  The act concludes with the reading of the Totenehrung (honouring the dead).[xxiii]  Normally the tune ‘Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden’ (‘I had a comrade’), which serves as the last salute to a fallen soldier, precedes the national anthem which then officially closes the ceremony.

 

The Volksbund’s activities continue to attract criticism. This derives mainly from its role in post-1945 West German war memory in which it has prioritized and promoted a perspective of German victimhood.[xxiv]   Although the Volksbund was forced to adapt to a changing remembrance culture, adjusting the motto of its work twice – from ‘To Our Dead’, which was replaced in the 1960s by ‘To the Victims of War and Tyranny’ and in the 1980s made way for ‘Working for peace.  Reconciliation over the graves’[xxv] -, criticism never ceased. 

Since unification of the two German states, the Volksbund’s activities have become much more complex, however, they still display some remarkable ambiguities.  There is continuity in the way in which the Second World War is de-contextualized, i.e. cut off and separated from its origin in National Socialism and its criminal and racist nature.  Issues of responsibility and guilt and historical explanations are largely avoided and the specific features of the Second World War are universalized.  The war is regarded as a ‘catastrophe’ and standing in a long line of wars before and others after 1945.  There are victims on all sides, and they all must be equally honoured, mourned and remembered.  This pattern of de-contextualization or universalization has serious implications for the line of argument of the Volksbund.  If war is a ‘universal catastrophe’, future wars need to be prevented and peace promoted through the principle of reconciliation (Versöhnung): 

‘The setting off of suffered injustices against each other leads nowhere. On each side, widows grieve for their husbands, children for their parents and mothers for their sons. It is not a comparison of grief that is needed, but reconciliation.’[xxvi]

Reconciliation (Versöhnung) or, more appropriately, forgiveness (Vergebung) is thus a principle which needs to be applied to all the fallen German soldiers, irrespective of their individual behaviour. There is a strong underlying notion that all soldiers were decent young men who were forced by circumstances and hence were victims, too, irrespective of the role they may have played within a murderous racial campaign.  Again, the claim that ‘death has erased all differences’ prevails.[xxvii]

Obviously, these patterns are heavily based on Christian thinking, and the religious component and the churches’ involvement in rituals of commemoration has always been substantial. The problem, however, is that Versöhnung cannot be demanded or even instigated by the ‘perpetrator’, but can only be offered by the victim who might not always be prepared to do so, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe[xxviii], the recent geographic focus of Volksbund activities.  Versöhnung is also attempted by a process of ‘internationalization’ of the Berlin Volkstrauertag ceremonies.  The Volksbund increasingly tries to include contributions from foreign guests as audience, artists or, less often, guest speakers.  To name only two examples:  In 2008, the main speaker was the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, a European choir took also part, and in 2002 ‘veterans from both sides of the Stalingrad front’ were amongst the audience.

The current key aim of reconciliation is also tried to be achieved by the provision of facilities, activities, and projects for its young members and a younger target group in general.  It is in this context that the Volksbund’s recent slogan ‘working for peace’ looks promising and convincing. The international workcamps (sic)[xxix] and the new Jugendbegegnungsstätten (young people’s meeting places) are perhaps the most typical examples. Three out of the six Jugendbegegnungsstätten were opened after 1990.  Five of them are located outside Germany.  What is even more important is the fact that the workcamps’ syllabi and programmes often make explicit reference to the commemoration of the victims of NS persecution.[xxx]  There appears to have developed a kind of division of labour if not burden-sharing: International camps with pacifist and ‘anti-fascist’ connotations for the young, and a Wehrmacht centred remembrance for the older generation.

Despite its dual dedication ‘To the Victims of War and Tyranny’, the Volksbund is still overwhelmingly concerned with the fallen German soldiers of the Second World War, both with regard to the maintenance of war graves and the annual commemorative ceremonies.  On Volkstrauertag 2002 for example, the then Volksbund president Wagner used in his main speech on the theme of the 50^th anniversary of the battle of Stalingrad, and in the presence of veterans from both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, some rhetorical techniques which clearly suggested an identification with the encircled Wehrmacht soldiers.  German school children read from letters soldiers had written home, however, only German ones.  Only few of the central Volkstrauertag ceremonies since 1990 have made explicit, substantial reference to the victims of NS persecution.  There are only few Volksbund remembrance projects focusing on the victims of Nazi persecution, and consequently the quarterly magazine also tends to marginalize the commemoration of the victims of persecution.  Articles such as, for example, one in 2002[xxxi] about the inauguration of a memorial for German and Austrian Jews killed in the Riga ghetto, are the exception rather than the rule.  Main articles or editorials on key anniversary events and written by prominent guest authors or the Volksbund presidents often simply omit[xxxii] any reference to the ‘other’ victims, i.e. those of NS tyranny.

Although the Volksbund focuses on German soldiers and shows relative restraint in commemorating the victims of Nazi persecution as non-combatants, it has fewer reservations to include German civilian victims, i.e. expellees, refugees, forced labourers, deportees, and victims of rape and bombings.  If there is a hierarchy of victims, German civilians take second place behind German soldiers. In 2002 Stimme & Weg reported from the inauguration of a Berlin memorial stone dedicated to the estimated 250,000 German women who were deported to forced labour in the Soviet Union. The article takes up the current theme of an alleged taboo to remember German victims of war.  One speaker in the inaugural ceremony, the Volksbund president Lange spoke in this context of the ‘failed duty of the [German] people’ to remember the fate of the abducted women and girls.[xxxiii]

As a remedy to the perceived universal evil of war, the Volksbund promotes an equally vague pacifism.  One of its regular adverts used in the past in national newspapers read Mit Krieg gewinnt man keinen Frieden (‘You don’t win peace through war’).[xxxiv] This seemingly pacifist statement, however, is contradicted if not undermined by the strong bonds between Volksbund and the German military, the Bundeswehr.  The highly visible presence of the Bundeswehr and military rituals has always been a feature of the Volkstrauertag events.  The Bundeswehr and its veterans’ organization help in various ways, e.g. through fund-raising, sponsorships for war graves sites, providing manpower for the maintenance of cemeteries and logistical support, including equipment for the Volksbund youth camps.[xxxv]  This pacifist line of work is in clear contrast to a recently developing interventionist foreign policy which sees the Bundeswehr engaging in peace-keeping and peace-enforcing missions in the name of human rights and counter-terrorism, most notably in Kosovo and Afghanistan.  It is conceivable that the necessary process of adjustment will not only call for a new advertising strategy[xxxvi] but could furthermore lead to inner-organization conflicts, in particular with the young activists within the Volksbund to whom the pacifist line is most appealing.

Conclusion

The Volksbund faces both a decline of membership figures owing to the aging of its core constituency and a decline in the public interest and involvement particularly in local[xxxvii] Volkstrauertag activities.  However, the Volksbund’s role as an intermediary between official politics, army, veterans and the general public in a civil society should not be underestimated.  In addition to providing legitimacy for the Bundeswehr, the Volksbund has a far-reaching socio-psychological function in disseminating socially accepted narratives, rituals, slogans and patterns of war commemoration in the wider context of coming to terms with the Nazi past.  Since 1945, the Volksbund has quite successfully adjusted to a changing political climate without ever surrendering its focus on the suffering of Germans as victims of war. 

 

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[i] See the late dedication of KZ-Dachau as a memorial site in the mid 1960s

[ii] U. Neirich,  Erinnern heisst wachsam bleiben. Pädagogische Arbeit in und mit NS-Gedenkstätten, Verlag an der Ruhr, Mühlheim an der Ruhr, 2000, p.17

[iii] M. Kuberek, op. cit., p.83.

[iv] P. Reichel, op.cit., p. 93-4.

[v] The Volksbund conducted its first regional Volkstrauertag in 1920.

[vi] ’Geschichte und Geschichten: Soldatenbriefe im Ersten Weltkrieg’, Süddeutsche Zeitung,  (17. November 2000), L4, 14.

[vii] A. Frey, ‘Ein Blümlein aufs Millionengrab’, in: D. Büchten, A. Frey (eds), Im Irrgarten Deutscher Geschichte. Die Neue Wache 1818 bis 1993, Berlin: Schriftenreihe des Aktiven Museums Faschismus und Widerstand in Berlin e.V., No. 5 (1993), pp. 20-30.

[viii] Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (ed) Schicksal in Zahlen, op.cit., p.22.

[ix] In April 2005 there were 835.  Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge. Eine Kurzdarstellung, www.volksbund.de/schon_gelesen/daten_fakten/kurzdarstellung.asp Accessed 13/04/2005.

[x] For the early phase of de-Nazification, cf W. Benz, ‘Nachkriegsgesellschaft und Nationalsozialismus. Erinnerung, Amnesie, Abwehr’, in: W. Benz, B. Distel (eds), Dachauer Hefte 6. Erinnern oder Verweigern (München: dtv, 1994).

[xi] G. L. Mosse, Gefallen für das Vaterland. Nationales Heldentum und namenloses Sterben (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993), p. 258.

[xii] op.cit, p.262.

[xiii] P. Reichel, op. cit., pp.111-3.

[xiv] ‘Wir warten auf die Heimkehr unserer Kriegsgefangenen. Ihre Leiden bleiben unvergessen.’

[xv] N. Gregor, ‘Living with loss, dealing with shame’, History Today, Vol 55, No 5, (May 2005) 37.

[xvi] Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsbeschädigte (ed), Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost- und Mitteleuropa, 5 volumes (Bonn: 1954-61). 

[xvii] M. Jeismann, ’Zeichenlehre. Vom nationalen Kriegsgedenken zum kulturellen Gedächtnis’, in: M Jeismann (ed) Mahnmal Mitte. Eine Kontroverse (Köln: Dumont, 1999), p. 7.

[xviii] M. Jeismann, op.cit., p.16.

[xix] op.cit., p.18.

[xx] U. Spittler, G. Knischewski, ‘Redefining German identity: Case Studies in Berlin’, Journal of Area Studies, 1945- Fifty Years on. No. 7 (1995) 100-13.

[xxi] ibid.

[xxii] It publishes a special brochure dedicated to giving recommendations for the organization of activities on Volkstrauertag:  E. & H. Bulitta Trauer, Erinnerung, Mahnung. Grundlagen und Materialien für einen zeitgemäßen Volkstrauertag. Pädagogische Handreichungen, Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V., Landesverband Bayern (München: 2002).   

[xxiii] cf Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (ed) Schicksal in Zahlen, op.cit., p.33.

[xxiv] cf M. Wittig, op. cit , p. 91.

[xxv] ‘Arbeit für den Frieden. Versöhnung über den Gräbern’.

[xxvi]‘Gegenseitige Aufrechnung führt in die Irre. Auf jeder Seite trauern Witwen um ihre Männer,     Kinder um ihre Eltern und Mütter um ihre Söhne. Nicht Aufrechnung, sondern Versöhnung ist

notwendig.’  Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of the FRG 1974-82 and former Wehrmacht soldier, quoted in a supplement  ‘8. Mai 1945. Das Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs’,  Stimme & Weg  (2/ 2005).

[xxvii] U. Spittler, G. Knischewski, ‘Redefining German Identity: Case Studies in Berlin’, op.cit.

[xxviii]  I. Traynor, ‘A corner of Russia that is forever Germany’, The Guardian (11/9/ 2000) 14.

[xxix] The Volksbund’s  publications use the English term.

[xxx] Gesamtkatalog 2005. Workcamps im In-  und  Ausland. Jugendbegegnungsstätten / Schulprojekte, Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V (2005).

[xxxi] Dr. M. Dodenhoeft, ‘“Nie wieder!” Gräber- und Gedenkstätte für jüdische Opfer aus dem Deutschen Reich in Riga eingeweiht’, Stimme & Weg (1/2002) 10-11.

[xxxii] R. Koch, [Prime Minister of the Land of Hesse], ’Kriegsgäberfürsorge bleibt aktuell. Die Friedensarbeit des Volksbundes’, Stimme & Weg (3/2001) 3.

[xxxiii] S. Dersch,  ’Dem Vergessen entrissen. Gedenkstein für verschleppte Frauen und Mädchen’, Stimme & Weg (1/2002) 8-9.

[xxxiv] ‘Jeder Strich einhunderttausend Tote im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Durch Krieg gewinnt man keinen Frieden’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (13/8/ 2003) 36.

[xxxv] B. Kästner, F. Kirchmeier, ‘Die Bundeswehr – verlässlicher Partner des Volksbundes. 50 Jahre Zusammenarbeit im Dienste von Frieden und Verständigung, Simme & Weg (2/2005) 8-9.

[xxxvi] This pacifist advert has hardly been used during the last few years.

[xxxvii] cf  M. Lurz, Kriegerdenkmäler in Deutschland, Vol. 6: Bundesrepublik (Heidelberg: Esprint Verlag, 1987), pp. 517-21