First inkling of disaster ... German dead, early in the Polish Campaign, laid out in a mass grave, 1939. In sadness, JR.
I’m surprised, being that early in the campaign, that they weren’t sent back to Germany for burial.
That’s a good point but also, sending casualties home is a very costly and time consuming business.If you take in account the work needed to prepare the bodies(journeys can be long).You can’t send all the bodies to one place(ftg’s point),but making preparations to send each individual to his homeplace.Just too much trouble.So sadly enough these mass graves were the solution.Probably hundreds of thousands of soldiers disappeared this way when their graves were destroyed later on in the war or after Germany’s defeat.
Because the homeland was not meant to be aware of the huge number of casualties.