The Hell where Youth and Laughter go - WWII German cemetery exhumation

here we are in a local cemetery and there's supposed to be 152 germans that were buried here in 1945 and the german government decided that it's time to exhume them from these unmarked graves where they are now and bring them to a to a german military cemetery so we're gonna start digging now digging them up [Applause] here the guys have just found the the first body that has its identification tag so they're figuring out exactly what role it is to know where we should keep on digging this is the first body and that's the visor from his hat that we just found a ring here they just found the tibia the tibia is broken and uh they put a tourniquet around around it to stop the bleeding this is the fractured leg once it's taken of the ground it's actually a theme or a tibia like i thought and this is the tourniquet that was put around it so it's a long piece of rubber that they tied around the leg this here is the identification tag that's found next to that leg that had a fracture with the tourniquet on it so it's not broken in half which might mean that the germans didn't find it themselves or the the guy was too bloody and they didn't want to go through his pants or something like that this first body must have suffered pretty horribly before dying because if you look at the legs here both of them have been amputated just above the knee so presumably he was severely wounded in the legs and then the some surgeons cut them off if and then he must have died and they buried him he was buried in a shelter quarter because you can see the the loops and the buttons from shot recorders that we found with the body i didn't see an identification tag on him yet this second body has a an identification tag that was near his arms it's for a pioneer unit and if you look at the body carefully you'll see that there's a fractured left femur from a bullet or a fragment who knows i didn't see any other wounds on him so far and then the third body i saw no wounds and no id tag either here if you look at his pocket you can see that he had a pair of pair of scissors in his pocket so all these bodies were obviously buried uh in a rush all at the same time you can see that the arms are linked together and everything as we're removing the the bones from this guy who had two amputated legs there's a small rank inside you here for a non-commissioned officer other tips of those two amputated legs on that poor soldier and you can clearly see the the saw marks from the surgeons saw on both sides this is the one that had the broken femur this is the fracture with all the all the bone fragments in the fragments there's still a little piece of iron so i'm just digging up the third body that had those scissors in his pocket and where his hand as you can see there's a ring in the ground no we'll try to take a look at it so those are some family initials apparently mw east coast just finishing to dig up one body here and on the arm there's one of these uh splints so the arm is broken here and these are the remains of a splint to prevent the fragments from moving so several of these bodies were treated in the hospital or something before before dying just found with one body so it uh it's a little thing to protect a matchbox when it's in your pocket it says rising mg battalion here souvenir of my army time and here there's a drawing of a machine gun here the guy just dug up another fractured femur with a tourniquet on it so here we just found some more of the typical stuff a bunch of condoms how many do you have is in this pocket how many do you have three this has been a dog tag found with uh london body what does it sound like it says first pioneer as that's battalion nine his number is two eight one zero blood group zero so this is the end of day one we found 22 bodies so far and 17 id tags this is the beginning of the second day so we're gonna dig up the the second row of german soldiers that are buried here here they just dug up a skull and this guy has interesting work on his teeth there's a bridge here on the front teeth here along with a german body they just found an italian canteen which is pretty interesting of course you can see it has two impacts one big one that went right through and then there's a smaller impact here that also came through [Applause] so the first body has nothing nothing particularly on it nothing particularly interesting on it there might be a dog tag once we take him out the second body is very interesting because as you can see he's lying on his stomach which is uh i don't know it's pretty unusual as far as i'm concerned for a body buried by the germans [Music] he has this ring that for some reason was buried near his neck and then the third body has a he must have an arm fracture because on the right arm you can see that there's a splint here like we found on several several of the other bodies taking this first body out of the ground and uh you can see on the top of the head there's an entrance a bullet hole so these kind of entrants are called keyhole bullet holes and it means the bullet came from this direction at an angle and then it made the this bone fragment fly off here and since there's no exit it means the bullet should still be inside the head so we're going to try to find it now so the face of the skull fell apart so we can look inside the skull and inside there's the bullet that would have crossed the hole here so it's a small caliber pistol bullet probably something shot from from very close up that's why i didn't exit so that's what killed this man now i've just been removing the bones of this uh the second body the one who had that air force ring and up here there was his hand and where his hand was there's this wedding ring it has initials g-s-c-h and then a date 15th of august 1939 so just before the war started we're done excavating the third body here that had the splint on the arm and if you look here so he has a splint like this going all on his forearm going up on the arm and the forearm here is smashed both uh both the bones and here there's a piece of rubber which is probably a surgical drain that the doctors put in there these are the forearm bones in the splint once they're taken off the ground so both the bones are fractured with multiple small pieces here they just found a body with an identification tag for a panzer unit and the tibia was very interesting because um there's an old fracture on it and you can see that it's been fixed with uh it's been fixed by a surgeon it has this wire in it at two places and you can see the bone is still bent it didn't really heal properly this digging has been so difficult that we had to call in an excavator to help us there's supposed to be another row of germans and of course we find that they're buried right under these trees here so apparently the trees are going to have to have to be taken down at the end of the day and we're just getting to the end of the second row we were able to dig up six of these bodies quite carefully unfortunately um only one of them has a dog tag and uh there's not much interesting things to see on them except that um this one here is on his back again i mean on the stomach so that's a bit surprising that the germans buried this guy on his stomach it's already the third we find like that today another interesting thing is that uh this last body has a string around his neck so we'll see what's on it maybe an identification tag for the string to have survived it means it should be made of nylon i was saying that these bodies didn't have anything interesting but this one turns out to have a an entrance sharpener hole here on the left side of his head and then a larger exit on the other side a pretty graphic uh illustration of what shrapnel can do just get deep under with the spade i mentioned before that there was a string around this soldier's neck that you can see here and sure enough it does lead us to an identification tag that seems to be in extremely good condition an aluminum tag i'll try to pull it out there that's almost brand new this is day three like i explained yesterday we had to tear down all those trees because the there's a line of 40 germans buried under the trees interestingly this croatian war monument was built pretty much right over the germans this is the old school that the germans had used as a field hospital and so a lot of the soldiers that were now exhuming died this is a tag they just found with one of the bodies for a pioneer unit and what's neat is you see that says blood group here and and the blood group was carved on by the soldier himself a so he figured it was important information and decided to add it on even though the army had forgotten about it this body right here that we're just excavating he's buried on his stomach again which we thought was strange at first but there's so many of them now that it's not so strange and on his arm he has a tourniquet so presumably when we'll go lower down there'll be a fracture or something we'll see that later so here we've just excavated seven bodies a couple of them have id tags so we'll go and look at them from close up the first interesting thing to see is that all of them have their legs that are going into this this croatian war monument so they built the monument over the german graves the first body we didn't notice anything special no dog tag no no wounds the same for the second one the same for the third one the fourth one is more interesting because up here near his neck he had his id tag it's still readable with no problems and if you look at him carefully you see that here in the pelvis there's a shrapnel hole right here so just that would be enough to cause well it could be a deadly wound depending on what what it hit inside the body of course this next one the fifth one has nothing particular the sixth one had a dog tag which is interesting because it's an air force dog tag it says uh it's a it's supposed to be for a pilot actually but presumably at the end of the war when there were no more airplanes or anything like that they sent him to the infantry after a bit and he got killed here and then the last body the seventh is buried on his back sorry on his stomach so that's the third or fourth we find on the stomach the first one surprised me but now they're becoming pretty common and then uh down here near his arm where the next body is that we haven't dug up yet there was this this piece of rubber which is a remains of a tourniquet i just forgot to mention something here near the seventh body is that there's a leg as you can see the tibia here and the foot here the femur part is missing but i presume that that's an amputated leg that they just buried along here with the bodies and then the femur got lost somehow during the digging process so this would have been an amputated leg they just threw into the grave to get rid of it this is the pelvic bone of that soldier who had a shrapnel wound in the in the pelvis and this is very typical you can see where the fragment went in the hole is rather small and then it came out the other side and the hole is much larger these skulls are very fragile and it's really neat to see how the roots found a great place inside them and they seem to love it in there we're trying to take these skulls out of the ground but it's impossible to do it without breaking them because these roots that are in the skull are attached to the ground underneath so as soon as you try to pull it it just tears everything apart it looks almost like a brain inside there oh yeah that's not completely you guys have just dug out of tibia here that's interesting because the guy had some fracture and you can see both the both the tibia and fibula are fused but in a not very nice looking way it looks like the doctors who took care of this guy didn't reduce the fracture properly so here we have two bodies that are very interesting because um on the list of burials their causes of death were listed this is body number 34 and 35 and the first one has a cause of death that says both legs torn off and the second one's cause of death is mind fragments in both legs or shell fragments in both legs and the left foot torn off so the first body here he has his id tag near his neck where it should be that is still beatable though it's probably not readable for you guys who are watching unfortunately of course these really interesting bodies were partly damaged by the excavator uh it dug too deep at this exact place and well anyway that kind of thing happens now um if we look at the legs you see that there's these uh splints all around the legs these metallic splints all around one of the legs goes all the way to the bottom where the foot is the femur here is intact and then the tibia if you go down you see it's fractured here and then there's a little piece of red rubber inside the fracture which is a surgical drain that the doctor would have put in there so that pus and stuff like that could uh could drain out of the wound and then the the splint goes around the foot and here you have some of the some of the bones from the feet now we'll take a look at the second body it's the one that was mostly damaged by the excavator but you can still see the arm in the head everything is still there he has a dog tag around his neck which is in excellent condition he has something here under his arm that we'll see later some kind of wallet or something as we go down we see that this is damaged by the excavator it would have been intact at the time here there's a shell fragment in the leg here there's a spoon and fork setup that has a bit of shrapnel damage where my thumb is and then as we go down to the tibias the shins we see these really horrible wounds both tibias start here and then they're completely mangled smashed into tiny pieces and then there's one foot that's here and you can see it's at a completely awkward angle so this guy's legs would have been pretty much reduced to the apple sauce as far as it looks like they didn't even take his shoe off so this is the second body that we're looking at right now with those both his legs that were completely blown apart now we've taken them out and you can see it's pretty impressive both tibias are just smashed to smithereens there's hardly any bones from the foot left on this leg on the right leg the left leg is also completely smashed the the tibia is still in the shoe as we saw before anyway really horrible wounds that this guy died of now that we've removed the that first body with both legs that were broken we can see the legs of the second one so one leg is intact and then the other one has that fracture that we saw earlier on now that we're taking the bones of this body out you can see that uh this is his right arm and the humerus is cut in half here and the rest of the arm is missing so apparently this guy had an arm that was blown off completely these are the fragments of the the arm bone and you can see that they all fit back together perfectly and the rest of the arm is the rest of the arm is missing now this is the broken tibia that had that small drain in it put all the pieces back together and there's an impact area here at the back i didn't find any fragment of shrapnel or anything inside it though in the meantime while i was exhuming some of the bodies the other guys found a body with an amputated shin this is the top part this would be the bottom part and as you can see it's cut off both the tibia and the fibula and then there's these little pieces of rubber that were surgical drains that were left in the wound here when you look at the the cut part from close up you can clearly see the saw marks and you can even see that on the top the surgeon kind of rounded the bone out so it wouldn't be too sharp against the flesh as i was saying earlier on they built their war monument right over the the german graves so now we're having to start tunnel underneath the monument to at least try to get some of them out here they're just trying to dig out the last german under the monument and for obvious reasons it wasn't possible to dig them up very carefully but this is a part of the skull and you can see there's a part of a shell fragment which is part of a driving band of the shell which is really interesting because you can know what caliber what country the shell is from and everything and it left a green mark on the skull they also found something else neat with this body it's this wire that was going all around it so it looks like uh this guy was probably buried in a blanket or a sheet or something and then they wrapped this wire around him to keep him nicely wound up get down low i hate this it's horrible to pass so these guys have been tunneling under the monument now for several hours and there's still supposed to be one body but as you can see he's about three meters in so it's becoming seriously difficult to work in there he gets a for effort though we're still missing about 40 or 50 of the bodies there's supposed to be two more rows so we're looking for them now but with all these new graves and everything it's hard to find really hard we turned lucky here because this place where we've been digging is actually a row of germs that we're looking for so we're starting to dig them out now here you can see there's one head the second head the third head i'm going to try to take these ones out carefully and near this third head there's already a dog tag so we're going to look at it and figure out who's supposed to be buried here one of these bodies were just finding a mirror they found the id tag a few minutes ago which is for some air force guy and then under the mirror there's a wound badge silver wound badge so that means this guy was wounded one uh twice or had been wounded severely before in the war before being killed and on this side i've kept on digging as well and this guy on his arm he has this white thing that of course everybody guessed as a condom and then down here there's a belt buckle made of iron coming back so i keep on digging the smear they found are still in perfect condition you can see we can see the camera in it and uh what about the whistle does it still work yeah last time that was a long time ago here beside where the wound badge was now there's an infantry assault badge it's pretty rare to find badges still on the bodies because they would usually take them off still in reasonably good condition the guys digging this hole here have just found a watch on the soldier so this is interesting because i showed you there was a watch right with one soldier earlier on and now what did they find digging up the same soldier here there's a second watch so it seems like he might have been uh taking things from uh prisoners or something like that at the time two watches on one soldier this is the stuff found with that watch steeler soldier and in this pocket there's a bunch of albanian coins one lakh 1930. so i'm ready here to dig out the the first body that i've excavated this morning it's literally under a modern day grave under the side of it so i'd shown it before he has an id tag and around his neck there seems to be a head wound that we can't see properly yet we'll see it better later i'll take the scout carefully but you see there's a fracture down the skull on the arm here there's a condom then there's a belt buckle on the other side there's a cigarette case a pocket knife and then a spoon and fork and nothing else on the body nothing particular this guy had a dog tag around his neck but now digging this stuff out from his pelvis area there's a second dog tag and when we look at the numbers and the list of burials it turns out that this dog tag from his neck actually probably belonged to the soldier right next to him and since they're on those long strings it ended up here for some reason and this is the stuff that was buried with the body so the cigarette case the knife the belt buckle and the spoon and fork set i'm digging out this second body that had the the tag on the other soldier's neck if you remember and to show you how complicated and messy this can get now when we're digging where his ribs are well what do you find another dog tag so there's three dog tags and only two soldiers so how are we going to make any sense out of that so to figure this thing out we looked at the list and they're supposed to be body 125 126 no 126 127 128 129 and the dog tiger with body 127 for some reason was on the neck of the body 129 so whatever we'll trust the the way the germans buried them but you can wonder why that dog tag got got around somebody else's neck pretty strange so now i'm carefully excavating this soldier who had the two id tags and i came to the area of where the right hand would have been and you can see there's a what looks like a wedding ring on that hand so i'll take a look at it see if there's anything written inside it [Music] so this is the ring but it's made of silver and i can't see anything written on it it would have to be cleaned to see if it has a data or something like that so we're digging up some of these more bodies and this one is interesting he has a pair of glasses actually still on his face i've never seen that before when you look at the teeth of a lot of these soldiers you wonder how they were surviving every day because of these absolutely horrible cavities almost all of them have cavities like that really is one body that i just excavated carefully all he's had with him is a bunch of uh buttons and loops from the shelter quarters which shows that he was buried in one of those shelter quarters so that's the german tent they had see these are loops from it the only interesting thing on him is this identification tag that was between his legs and his pelvic area other than that there's no fractures nothing interesting at all and then the we're going to finish these other soldiers here this one should have a dog tag somewhere because of the string around his neck and this one has a dog tag under his spine that we're going to dig up soon so this is the dog tag that i sing is under his spine so we're just going to gonna excavate it right now there hasn't seen the light of a day for 75 years so we're going to dig up this last body you know he also had no clothes no buttons the only stuff on him were these shelter quarter parts and then there's a string around his neck we're going to see if there's a dog tag now as we dig him out so now as expected i just removed the soldier's head and under the head here's the id tag and this is kind of ironical because the guy had a string of nylon that's in perfectly brand new condition after 70 or 80 years but of course his id tag is iron so it's completely destroyed it'll be impossible to read it slightly ironical anyway that was the last body for this this year's dig these are all the id tags from from this dig so there's literally dozens and dozens of them since most of the soldiers had them hold them she was buried here in 1934. she saw the germans burying their dad and now she's looking at us excavating them again with that look in her eyes makes you realize the insignificance of human life you

Channel: CrocodileTear

Views: 4,224,887

Keywords: World War II, digging, exhumation, metal detecting, détection, identification tag, forensic, battlefield archaeology, wehrmacht, nazi, 1939, 1944, 1945

Id: hOadUNu2tl4

Length: 32min 25sec (1945 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 26 2022