'A common humanity': how caring for Germany's war dead healed British grief

List of 7,000 axis soldiers buried in the Uk highlights how tending their graves brought countries back together after the world wars

- Donna Ferguson

For some, tending the graves was an act of reconciliation. For others, it was about acknowledging shared losses and shared grief.

Thousands of Germans who died in Britain during the first and second world wars were laid to rest in local graveyards. British people tended these graves for decades, even laying flowers and wreaths for their former foes.

A historian has uncovered new details of this extraordinary relationship, and found that more than 7,000 German soldiers and prisoners of war were once buried in cemeteries near the British towns and villages where they died. Tim Grady, professor of modern history at the University of Chester, unearthed a previously overlooked pile of documents "wrapped in brown paper" in the German War Graves Commission (VDK) archives, which turned out to be interwar records about the graves from the German embassy in London that no scholar had ever consulted.

After the wars, Grady said, there were so many dead soldiers scattered across the globe that people felt that tending to the war graves in their local area was a "tangible" way of overcoming the "horrors of war".

"If you can do something for the war dead who are close to you, perhaps other people will do the same for your loved ones, wherever they are buried," he said.

The policy of the Imperial War Graves Commission was to leave the bodies of British soldiers in the country where they had died, too, meaning thousands were buried in military cemeteries abroad rather than repatriated.