Remains of two Wehrmacht soldiers from Danube: one served in Waffen-SS
A Wehrmacht motorcycle has been recovered from the Danube with two German soldiers' remains and ID tags. One likely served in the Waffen-SS; their bones are examined for age and signs of a mine.
For more than eight decades, the remains of two German soldiers lay in the mud of the Danube. Only the exceptionally low water level of the river in Budapest has brought their story back to light.
Alongside the bodies, German identity discs in perfect condition were found. That gives an unusually strong chance of identifying the men more than 80 years on.
The discovery is closely linked to a remarkably well-preserved DKW NZ 350-1 that was found on the Buda bank of the Danube at the beginning of August.
Under or immediately next to the motorcycle, staff from the Hungarian Institute and Museum of Military History came across the human remains. Volksbund employee Gábor Kohlrusz recovered the bones of the two men from the exposed riverbed.
Kohlrusz has been working in Hungary for many years as an exhumation specialist for the Volksbund. His duties include searching for, recovering and documenting German war dead, as well as securing personal belongings and identity discs. Together with historians and local partners, he helps to establish the identities of the fallen and shed light on wartime fates that have long remained unresolved.
Two dead men who most likely have been considered missing to this day
When German soldiers were killed in the Second World War, their identity discs were split in two: one half remained with the dead man, the other was sent to the Wehrmacht information office in Berlin so that deaths could be registered and relatives informed.
Because both identity discs recovered from the two men from the Danube are still intact, it suggests that their families probably waited in vain for official news.
In addition to the identity discs, a wedding ring and a Kuban shield were found. If the insignia can be clearly attributed to one of the fallen, it could provide a revealing clue to his military career. The Kuban shield was awarded to German soldiers who served in 1943 in the Kuban bridgehead in the south of the Soviet Union. The decoration was instituted in September of that year.
If it is confirmed that one of the two soldiers wore the shield, that would indicate that he had already been deployed on the Eastern Front years before his death.
Arne Schrader, head of the War Graves Service and International Relations department, knows how difficult such attribution can be. To determine whether the two identity discs really belong to the bodies found, several investigations are required. The names of the original bearers may be identified relatively quickly, but that alone does not settle who the dead men actually are.
Identification is a painstaking process
The starting point is a detailed examination of the remains. Even the length of individual bones can give clues to the height of the deceased. Wherever possible, different bones are used for this – for example, lower and upper leg bones. Taken together, the findings gradually build up a picture that can be compared with the known data on the possible bearers of the identity discs.
There are various anatomical reference points for estimating age, which allow experts to judge with a high degree of probability whether a bone belonged to someone under 20, between 20 and 25, or to an older person up to and beyond 40.
How old the two soldiers were is not yet known. The anthropological examination of the remains is intended, among other things, to use bones, epiphyses and wisdom teeth to determine their approximate age.
"Here, among other things, the sacrum and the epiphyses on the long bones can be analysed, and the wisdom teeth can also provide information," explains Arne Schrader. Dental fillings can also offer clues to origin: teeth filled with amalgam suggest that the deceased probably came from Western Europe.
One of the identity discs now recovered from the Danube belonged to a Wehrmacht soldier, the second to a member of the Waffen-SS.
However, it still has to be clarified whether the discs actually belong to the two recovered bodies. Any provisional identification made by the Volksbund would then have to be officially confirmed by the Federal Archives.
Around 900,000 people served in the Waffen-SS over the course of the war. They included committed National Socialists and foreign volunteers, but also, especially towards the end of the conflict, conscripts and minors.
The discovery site lay in an area where harbour silt had accumulated; the mud was mixed with gas oil. These particular conditions appear to have helped preserve both parts of the motorcycle and the identity discs exceptionally well.
The Volksbund can now cross-check the data on the discs with military records, missing persons reports and its own "Gräbersuche Online", a database that now contains around 5.4 million records.
What does the DKW NZ 350-1 have to do with the soldiers?
According to current knowledge, the motorcycle is a DKW NZ 350-1 manufactured in Saxony. From 1944 this model was developed specifically for wartime deployment.
The mere fact that the motorcycle was found together with the two dead men does not, however, prove that they were travelling on it.
Several scenarios are conceivable: the two men may have been riding the motorcycle themselves, with one driving and the other as passenger. It is equally possible that the DKW belonged to a unit while the two soldiers came from a different context. The motorcycle may also have reached the site only after the men had died. The machine could have fallen into the Danube during fighting or have been deliberately sunk there at a later point.
Ammunition was also lying on the riverbed
During the recovery work, the bomb disposal service had to be called in because, alongside other items of equipment, Type 35 Teller mines were discovered – German anti-tank mines from the Second World War.
The Hungarian Military History Institute (source in German) (source in Hungarian) considers it possible that the site could be a wartime and waste dump created after the end of the siege. Whether the items found were deliberately disposed of at this spot, and under what circumstances, cannot yet be definitively established.
A link to the Battle of Budapest?
From a historical perspective, a connection with the fighting for Budapest would seem likely.
The Battle of Budapest lasted from late October/early November 1944 until 13 February 1945 and was among the bloodiest and most ferocious engagements of the final phase of the Second World War in Hungary. Budapest was defended by German and Hungarian units against the Soviet Red Army and Romanian forces. After the city was encircled at the end of December 1944, the battle turned into a prolonged siege, ending with the capture of Budapest by Soviet troops on 13 February 1945.
The fighting was extremely brutal and claimed numerous lives on both sides.
Today, the German-Hungarian war cemetery at Budaörs, west of Budapest, is the largest burial site for German and Hungarian war dead in Hungary. It is home mainly to soldiers who fell in Budapest and in areas east of the Danube. According to the Volksbund, 16,630 dead have now found their final resting place in Budaörs.
Whether the two men from the Danube actually fell during the Battle of Budapest is something only further research will show. What is already certain is that their remains will be interred in the war cemetery at Budaörs.
The discovery illustrates how many traces of the past are still hidden today in Europe's rivers. The Danube was an important transport and traffic artery not only during wartime.
The Volksbund explicitly expects that, because of the current low water level, further war dead could also be recovered from emerging shipwrecks.
The find in Budapest may therefore not be the last of its kind.
