File of the Lost
Displaced Germans Search for Displaced Germans
Title: File of the Lost [de: Kartei der Verlorenen]
Author: Herbert Freudental
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 03, Issue 03 (March 1949) [ToC LINK]
Page(s): 197-199 [LINK]
The horror of war is not measured solely by the sheer scale of its commonplace immediate losses in life, land and property; what sears it into the experience of contemporary sufferers and the memory of history are, above all, the unprecedented aspects of its particular manifestation, which fundamentally set it apart from its traditional image. Thus, when we describe World War II as by far the most devastating of all previous violent conflicts among nations, we do indeed commemorate the unparalleled losses in human strength and material value, and the immeasurable individual suffering they entail; but what remains most persistently present to us is the unforeseen, the novel developments it brought forth: in the technology and tactics of combat, in the barbarization of customs, in the dictates of the temporary and ultimate victors.
One such unprecedented aspect is, for example, the thesis of the totality of war and the ruthless inclusion of all means and forces in mobilization and reparation, is the tacit disregard of international conventions, is the bombing of non-combatants up to their atomic annihilation, is the expulsion of indigenous populations, the enslavement of civilians and prisoners of war, and the withholding of peace agreements after the laying down of arms. Another such unprecedented aspect is the search service of the German Red Cross.
Where do we find, when we leaf back through the annals of European history, recorded that the innermost fabric of a people was shattered, its familial web torn apart and blown away, shred by shred, by the storm? That millions who belonged together can no longer find their way back to one another, that they wander and search in what was once the best-organized state with its manifold precise registrations, searching like the first humans after a natural catastrophe, with the impotence of their immediate appeal to all they encounter? That they wait for an echo from those who were lost, for a sign of life from the missing, who, like them, roam unknown through the lands or perhaps have long since been trampled underfoot somewhere? Where is the nameless suffering recorded, that the neighbor knows nothing of his neighbor, meagerly nourishing his hope from hundreds of inquiries, only to finally become entangled in the thicket of disappointments? Yes, where is it recorded that years after the silencing of the clamor of arms, people of a nation call out to one another in their own fatherland, parents their children, children their parents, and between the generations, peers, women and men, who found each other to build a piece of the future together?
This longing reveals itself most visibly in the search notices for missing soldiers on the bulletin boards of train stations. Many pass by heedlessly this mirror image of German fate, which, once inconceivable, has already become a matter of habit. But every now and then, one sees someone break out of the bustling traffic and, for a moment, in silent intercession, declare solidarity with the concern of one:
“Who knows my husband?”
“Who has seen my son?”
“Who can provide information about my brother?”
Do not shake your head right away! Perhaps you do know him after all. Here is his exact personal description: he was with this unit and had this field post number; there he last fought, and there he was last seen. Do not leave yet! This is what he looks like: here is a picture in uniform and here one in civilian clothes. Now perhaps you remember;
“even the smallest piece of news is gratefully received”
by his mother, his wife and his sister there and there. No, you know nothing? Too bad. But the plea lingers for the next one enticed by the headline:
“Who knows my son?”
“Who has seen my brother?”
“Who can provide information about my husband?”
In the end, there is one among the hundreds of thousands who hurry by, one who remembers and can provide information, even if it is with the last news that he perished somewhere.
All these many small posters in the passages and waiting rooms of train stations are outposts of the great army of the picture search service in Camp Friedland. 90,000 photos of soldiers are displayed there, and on average, out of 100 returnees, five of the depicted are recognized as comrades.
Day after day, the search service also speaks in the living appeal of the human voice on the radio. It is always new names, mostly from the former eastern provinces of the Reich, women, men, children, the elderly, each in a relationship of kinship or friendship to the one who asks: being sought is; she is the sister, the fiancée, the aunt of; he is the grandfather, the grandson, the brother-in-law of. Being sought, being sought, being sought, people of all ages, from all zones, of all professions and classes, whose trace was lost in the mill of the migration of the displaced, voices in the noise of the last battles, scattered drops from the whirlpools of the refugee stream of the homeless.
But all inquiries are compiled at the large book centers in Hamburg, Munich and Berlin. Here, since the refugee misery began, the German Red Cross has built up the complete card index of the lost and thus created a receiving device for the callers on all waves. The names of 15 million eastern expellees and 3.5 million missing Wehrmacht soldiers are collected here; 10 million of them have been and are being processed. And this is the echo of this blessed work: by the end of last year, over 5.5 million were reconnected with their relatives, children with their parents, discharged soldiers with their families, widows with the certainty about their husband’s death. Hamburg, for example, which employs 560 staff in long rows of rooms, is involved with more than half; daily, around 2,000 cases are clarified here, in September of the previous year, 80,000, in the most successful months up to 120,000. It is estimated that probably 1 million scattered individuals found each other again through their own efforts. Thus, there still remain around 3.5 million from whom no news has come so far, more precisely: 1,800,000 soldiers, 1,600,000 civilians and 28,000 parentless children, all pivotal points of fates that continue to be held in suspense, almost four years after the end of the war.
The main impulses for reducing this still shockingly high number come from the returning prisoners of war. In the summer of the previous year, around 200 returning prisoners arrived daily in Frankfurt an der Oder. Generally, for 80 of them, nothing was known about their relatives. Of these, the Berlin search office could provide closer information for about 20. The remaining 60 reports were processed in Hamburg and Munich after airmail notification, where, based on the card index, help could be provided in an average of 28 cases. The remaining 32 names were called on the radio broadcast on the same day, and as a rule, for half of them, clues could be utilized from the listener circle. Thus, only a fifth of the seekers remain without an immediate answer.
And these calls are the ones that, like many others from civilian life circumstances, initially go unanswered. They mostly find only a chance echo, are repeated ever more weakly and hopelessly, until one day they fall completely silent. Some end up eventually with some fortune-teller; only occasionally is the veil lifted on the extent of this last refuge search, as when, for example, the newspaper reports in a marginal note that such a clairvoyant has been punished because he commercially provided highly dubious and arbitrary information about human fates based on submitted photos and documents. But many lonely people fetch a weak consolation here for the hope of their short days.
It should not be concealed that in other countries through which the war passed, missing persons are also being sought. On German soil, in the castle of the former Prince of Waldeck, the International Tracing Service in Arolsen works as a central office to process the appeals published in 70 newspapers and 30 radio stations; it maintains offices in Göttingen and Esslingen for the British and American zones, exchanges information and documents with all related national offices, searches primarily in the displaced persons camps of Germany, Austria and Italy for the missing, and has also reconnected many torn threads. But the total number of these lost is only a fraction of the German losses, and many missing are emigrants who, mostly for political reasons, have voluntarily broken the bridges to their homeland. The actual unprecedented nature of humanitarian scale on the basis of a poor and sick-stricken people remains the German search service.
And this search service is currently in distress. As recently as 1947, almost half of its expenses could be covered from private donations. After the currency reform, these contributions have steadily decreased; the assets of the German Red Cross have shrunk, and the states, burdened with budget worries, have also pushed for savings in their subsidies from public funds. The search service proposed to merge the three centers into a single one in Hamburg. After initial agreement, the southern German governments, led by Bavaria, rejected such a regulation, and the work is in danger of succumbing to particularist sensitivities. While these lines are being written, negotiations are apparently still ongoing to find a solution in the interest of the spiritually poorest of the entire people that enables the continuation of the search service until one day the last lost ones must be laid to rest in the great mass grave of the unknown German war victim. We hope that in the multifaceted, fragmented Germany, one will reflect on this nationwide task as a modest thanks from the fatherland.
For whoever is still searching for his family today has truly lost much. Not only home and possessions, not only profession and homeland; some have also lost memory, and the youngest generation, along with their parents, perhaps even their names. Initially, there were 630 such children counted; the search service helped 330 regain their names, 230 of them also their parents. So 800 remain nameless. They bear substitute names, respond to terms of endearment from kindergarten teachers; but father and mother have faded from their memory like their refugee fate. There was one among them, a little boy, who recently found his mother again after three years, after 10 pairs of parents had already claimed that he was their child whom they had lost in flight.
There, it sometimes seems to us as if we all, the entire people, are today lost children of humanity, lost somewhere in flight or even abandoned as burdensome and wayward in a desert of ruins, foundlings who namelessly search for parents as for the primal ground of their existence in the community. And perhaps we remember a great seeker from millennia ago, the Cynic Diogenes, who overcame for himself the external demands of life to the point of complete needlessness and, thus purified, went out into the bright day and among the crowd that gawked at him, searched for humans with a lantern. It sometimes seems to us as if the suffering we have traversed has now almost given us the right to ask again for humans in the wide world around us.