Thousands of German WW2 corpses in Czech factory

Wed Mar 22, 2006 11:21 AM ET
USTI NAD LABEM, Czech Republic (Reuters) - Thousands of corpses of German soldiers killed in World War Two are being kept in boxes in a northern Czech factory due to a lack of funds, officials said Tuesday.
The exhumed bodies have been kept for three years in the rundown factory 90km (54 miles) north of Prague on the border with eastern Germany and are now guarded by police who are waiting for the bodies to be moved.
A Reuters photographer at the site said the remains -- an estimated 4,000 sets in total -- lie in small black boxes as they wait for a new burial site.
The German wartime graves association led a project in the mid-1990s to exhume the remains, which include soldiers who fought across eastern Europe in the war, with plans to bury them in a Prague cemetery until a lack of funds halted the plan.
"We are very sorry, but our People's Association for Care for Wartime Graves has run out of money, so I cannot say what will be done with the remains," Sebastian Gerhardt, a spokesman for the German embassy in Prague was quoted as saying in the daily Mlada Fronta Dnes.
He was not immediately available to comment on the report.
A police spokeswoman said an investigation was ongoing into how the remains ended up at the factory, a former pipe fittings plant.
City officials said talks between the German and Czech foreign ministries were planned for this week to find a solution to the affair.
The Czech Republic, which was invaded by Germany in 1939 just ahead of World War Two, already has some 10 military cemeteries where German war dead are buried.
I guess there safe, as long as none of them want to be burried near each other, then the catholics will just have a field day.