Recovery of 640 Squadron Halifax Crew

From today’s Daily Telegraph:

German works tirelessly ‘to give war dead a face’
By Kate Connolly in Lietzen

With the gentlest of touches Erwin Kowalke ran his fingertips along the tops of four tiny cardboard coffins. “My job is to give the dead a face,” he said.

For 25 years he has been doing just that, unearthing the bones of soldiers who perished in the woods around Berlin during ferocious battles in the final days of the Second World War and trying to identify them.

In front of him, in the grounds of a German war graves cemetery, lay the remains of five RAF crew members in four shoebox-sized brown coffins.

The airmen’s remains were discovered last year in a wood in Gerbisbach near Wittenberg, north-east of Berlin, during one of Mr Kowalke’s many missions. The find followed a tip-off by a local resident who had watched on the night of March 24, 1944 as a blazing RAF Halifax plummeted to the ground before smashing into pieces.

Of the original crew of seven, two escaped, possibly with parachutes. In his detailed report to the Volksbund, the German war graves commission, Mr Kowalke, 63, wrote of the crew from the RAF’s 640 Squadron: “I estimate their ages to be between 20+ and up to 30, one must have been heavily built. Another had previously broken his left shinbone and fibula.” He even listed the shoe sizes of four of the men, as well as the make of their footwear. “Some of the crew members were flung out of the plane as it crashed,” he wrote.

For Mr Kowalke, whose anatomic and forensic knowledge is all self-taught, it is all in a day’s work. Since 1980, when he carried out his work illegally because the then-communist regime ruled that nobody was to have anything to do with the remains of a “fascist army”, he and his network of volunteers have worked on the remains of 20,000 soldiers.

Even now 1,000 bodies a year are still uncovered in and around the sandy battlefields of Berlin where more than 100,000 German, Russian and Allied soldiers lost their lives. More than 10,000 are still believed to be there.

The Ministry of Defence is close to a final identification of the remains of the Halifax’s crew. A spokesman said the aim was to bury the remains in September.

Mr Kowalke said: “Some bureaucrats in Germany find it tiresome and pointless having to deal with the dead decades after the war but I only need to see a grateful widow who finally knows the whereabouts of her loved-one after 60 years spent in the dark to know that the work is worth it.

“After all, one in seven war widows are still alive, while 1.3 million Germans remain missing in action.”

The task of identifying the RAF crew was a relatively easy one. Often Mr Kowalke only comes across an engraved wedding ring when he is roaming in the woods with his metal detector.

He said all the soldiers he finds he treats equally, regardless of nationality.

“My work is my way of trying to make amends for what Germany did,” he said.