War remembrance in a sacralized space of memory: The origins and evolution of Volkstrauertag in Kitchener,Ontario,Canada

Abstract

In 1970, the remains of 187 German prisoners-of-war who died in Canada during World Wars I and II were transferred from three dozen sites across the country to a central burial ground in Kitchener, Ontario. Since then, a remembrance event (Volkstrauertag) has been organized each November by members of the local German-Canadian community at the German War Graves in Kitchener’s Woodland Cemetery. I address the initial controversy that surrounded the decision to establish a central war cemetery to German prisoners-of-war. I then explore the evolving narrative that underlies the local annual remembrance ceremony and reveal incidents where the German War Graves temporarily became a contested site of memory. I conclude by arguing that, in contrast to observations of the event in Germany, the formative tradition of commemorating all-victims-of-war rather than simply the German war dead has not only been maintained in Kitchener but has broadened in recent years.

Keywords

Canada German prisoners of war Kitchener remembrance war graves war memorials

Introduction

On the third Sunday of November 2013, some 500 people gathered in a cemetery in Kitchener, Ontario, to reflect on the horrors of World War I (WWI) and World War II (WWII) and honour the war dead. The event could have been mistaken for one of the countless Remembrance Day ceremonies held across the country a week prior if not for the delivery of speeches and songs in German, the performance of a brass band, and the fluttering of the German flag and a black banner with white crosses (symbolizing the war dead) next to the Canadian flag. For over 40 years, orchestrations of remembrance for Volkstrauertag, or the German ‘People’s Day of Mourning’, have taken place in a secluded corner of Kitchener’s Woodland Cemetery where the remains of 187 German prisoners-of-war (PoWs) who died in various internment camps across Canada during the World Wars now rest.¹

This article begins by examining the origins of and initial controversy that surrounded the establishment of the German War Graves section in Kitchener’s Woodland Cemetery. The article then explores the dominant but evolving narrative that has surrounded the annual remembrance ceremony, as well as incidents for which the War Graves temporarily became a contested place of memory. To contextualize the origin and evolution of the site and ceremony, a brief historical overview will be given on Kitchener’s once dominant but subsequently suppressed German heritage. The connections between commemorative performance and collective memory will then be introduced, with particular emphasis being placed on addressing the evolution of post-WWI and WWII war remembrance in Germany where Volkstrauertag originates.

Beginnings

Few place-names can be more synonymous with British imperialism than Kitchener. In fact, it was imposed on this predominantly German immigrant community at the height of WWI jingoism when the original name, Berlin, offended Canadian sensitivities. The once widely celebrated German heritage of an industrial city formerly priding itself to outsiders as ‘Busy Berlin’ was subsequently suppressed. It was replaced by a more innocuous Mennonite place image (Hayes, 1999), one that was more closely associated with the surrounding rural cultural landscapes of Waterloo Region. It was only in the late 1960s that German heritage was once again actively celebrated in public, albeit with a similarly inoffensive image, that of an annual Bavarian-themed Oktoberfest.²

Much has been written about the historical presence of German-speaking people in what is now Kitchener, a mid-size city located some 100 km west of Toronto (Figure 1). In particular, local historians have written a great deal on the city’s Mennonite origins following the great ‘Conestoga trek’ of Mennonites from Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. They have also addressed the subsequent arrival of German-speaking immigrants from continental Europe and their achievement in helping to build a vibrant industrial centre by the late nineteenth century (McLaughlin, 1989). But it has been the wartime toponymic change of Berlin, the ‘German capital of Canada’, to Kitchener and post-WWI restraints on the city’s formerly celebrated German cultural expression that has received growing attention from local historians and scholars. In particular, the outcomes of anti-German wartime sentiment, which culminated with the 1916 Berlin-Kitchener name change against the desire of most residents, have been addressed in several works (Lovasz, 2008). However, little has been said about Kitchener’s post-WWII identification with its formative ethnocultural heritage or, with the exception of ‘K-W Oktoberfest’s’ origins (Kobus, 2005), how the city’s now proportionately small German-Canadian population has celebrated its heritage since the beginnings of official multiculturalism in 1971. Certainly, much could be written about an attempt to rename Kitchener Berlin in 1991 or on the introduction of two new German-themed annual events (Christkindl Market, est’d 1996, and German Pioneers Day, est’d 1999). This article instead examines the city’s annual Volkstrauertag ceremony, which is an equally if not more important and certainly more controversial, older, and more hidden aspect of this local revival of ethnocultural display.

Figure 1.

Location of Kitchener, Ontario.

War memorials and memory

Monuments and memorials that are revisited in ceremonies of commemoration constitute ‘frameworks of collective memory’ (Halbwachs, 1992). As lieux de mémoire they acquire meaning and selectively represent to us a past (Nora, 1989). As Beckstead et al. (2011) recently state in reference to war memorials, such sites and associated commemorative practices serve to ‘anchor memories about past events and present societal (though contested) remembrances about these events and the nation’ (p. 194). Put simply, particular stories of the past are embodied and objectified in ritualistic sites of memory, and the act of remembering through memorials helps create ‘a collective memory of the past that is accessible to members of a group’ (Beckstead et al., 2011: 196).

Within the broader literature on war memory,³ there has been a growing volume of works exploring not only how hegemonic metanarratives of memory are expressed at and embodied within individual war memorials (Gordon and Osborne, 2004; Mayo, 1988; Stephens, 2007) but also how the meaning of these sites of memory are contested through transgressive acts and counter-memorials (Gough, 2008; Szpunar, 2010). In addition, some scholars have explored how the relevancy of memorials changes over time with fading memories and shifting values (Johnston and Ripmeester, 2007; Osborne, 1998). Recently, there has also been an emergent literature on the role that memorials can play in promoting the healing of war-inflicted trauma (McKim, 2008; Watkins et al., 2010) and in encouraging or even hindering post-conflict reconciliation (Clark, 2013; Johnson, 2011).

While much of the literature has focussed on the commemorative practices that are associated with particular monuments and memorial landscapes, little attention has been paid to examining war remembrance ceremonies at the final resting place of the war dead (Walter, 1993). This case study adds to the small but growing literature on the war cemetery as both a commemoration space and a site of pilgrimage (Butler and Suntikul, 2012; Stephens, 2014; Walls, 2011). It also contributes to the even smaller body of work dealing with vernacular commemoration by ethnocultural communities whose memories of particular wars may be perceived by the outsider to be potentially contentious in relation to official scripts or to other ethnocultural and religious groups (Dick, 2010; Kobayashi and Ziino, 2009). Finally, the author is not aware of any other study that deals with Volkstrauertag outside of Germany. This article may provide a useful reference point for future studies on similar sites like the Glencree German War Cemetery in Ireland or the Fort Reno PoW Cemetery in El Reno, Oklahoma, two of many burial grounds outside of Germany where Volkstrauertag also occurs.⁴

War cemeteries and German war remembrance

War cemeteries are relatively modern. As Mosse (1979) pointed out, the Soldiers’ Cemetery at Gettysburg (1863) represents one of the very first military burial grounds where systematically collected bodies from the battlefield were transferred and buried in one place. In Europe, military cemeteries and the ‘democratization of death’ with the creation of uniform memorial markers to all fallen soldiers, irrespective of rank, was one of the results of the unprecedented mass slaughter of WWI (Stephens, 2007, 2010). In Germany, as in the case of French and British war cemeteries, the emphasis was on simplicity. Emperor Wilhelm II summed up the model in a letter written in 1917 to the Prussian Minister of War: ‘cemeteries should be designed with “soldierly simplicity” in mind, in harmony with surrounding nature; [and] differences of rank should be avoided …’ (Mosse, 1979: 10). Simple, undecorated and uniform gravestones emphasized wartime camaraderie and were intended to foster a reverential mood among visitors.

Rather than conveying more pacifist messages, interwar memorials in Germany more frequently thematisized the ‘heroic soldier’. Indeed, unlike postwar France or Britain where the tomb of the unknown soldier ‘served as a warning that such slaughter should never be allowed again’ (Bartov in Forner, 2002: 547), a cult of the fallen soldier was nurtured in Germany. Consequently, war memorials ‘emphasized heroism and the primacy of the nation over the individual’ (Livingstone, 2010: 69). Mosse (1979) argued that the cult of the fallen soldier assimilated ‘the basic theme of a familiar congenial Christianity … [deploying] an analogy of the sacrifice in war to the passion and resurrection of Christ’ (p. 14). He went on to state that the mixture of Christian symbolism (e.g. crosses) and nature in German military cemeteries accentuated this death and resurrection theme and ‘subsumed the tragedy of individual death under a larger national cause’ (p. 15).

The cult of the fallen and Christian valence of sacrifice and transcendence of death has also been identified in recent studies on war remembrance ceremonies in interwar Germany. In particular, the transfiguration of mass scale death into an image of heroic sacrifice underpinned the origins of Volkstrauertag (People’s Day of Mourning). The call for a commemorative ceremony at the Reichstag in Berlin was made in 1922 by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge or German War Graves Commission (hereafter VDK or Volksbund) – a private organization that was put in charge of designing and maintaining war cemeteries. Beginning in 1924, Volkstrauertag became an annual national commemoration ceremony with events organized by VDK chapters across the country (Kaiser, 2008). Originally held on the first Sunday of Lent (Invocavit Sunday), the commemoration day was re-positioned in 1926 on the fifth Sunday before Easter (Reminiscere Sunday) (Margalit, 2010) so as to symbolize and unify the country around the notion of the ‘resurrection of the German nation’ (Kaiser, 2010: 16). The symbolism surrounding the sacrificial deaths of soldiers in the Volkstrauertag ceremonies of Weimar Germany was appropriated without difficulty in Hitler’s Germany; the commemoration day was severed from the ecclesiastical year and, to further nurture the cult of the fallen soldier, it was renamed in 1934 as Heldengedenktag (Heroes’ Remembrance Day).

Kaiser (2010) has asked, given the Wehrmacht’s role in the war of aggression, how was it possible that the commemorative event to fallen German soldiers could continue after WWII? As she points out, the answer lies in the outward transformation of the event in West Germany, where the tradition continued on after a short interruption in the postwar period.⁵ Promptly given back its original name, Volkstrauertag was reconfigured so as to commemorate civilian deaths in addition to fallen soldiers. However, in light of the growing awareness of German wartime atrocities, the initial reconfiguration of the officially revived event of 1950 was insufficient from the government’s standpoint: Volkstrauertag had to encompass both the ‘memory of suffering’ (Leidgedächtnis) and the ‘memory of guilt’ (Schuldgedächtnis) (Kaiser, 2010: 17). As such, Volkstrauertag evolved, especially over the course of the 1960s, as a commemoration day for all victims of war: not only dead German soldiers and civilians but also those who were persecuted and perished under Nazi rule. Thus, as early as 1951, reference was made to resistance fighters and those who died in concentration camps, and a year later to ‘those killed in air raids, victims of concentration camps, and the dead in Jewish cemeteries’ (Kaiser, 2010: 19). Furthermore, in order to reframe the event away from the problematic cult of the fallen soldier, the date of Volkstrauertag was moved in 1952 from spring to fall. It is this reconfigured event, which takes place every year in November, that was transferred to Canada some 43 years ago.

Origins

During WWI, approximately 2000 German PoWs were interned in various locations in Canada while over the course of WWII the number was estimated to be over 30,000. In both cases, the vast majority of PoWs were sent back to their homeland after the wars. However, some did not make it out of the internment camps due to battle wounds, work-related accidents, illnesses, suicide, failed attempts to escape, and even cases of murder and execution. Numerically, the majority of the nearly 200 German PoWs who died in Canada fought in WWII. Their remains were typically buried at the location of the internment camp.

On 18 April 1970, a brief news article appeared in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record about an inquiry that had been made by the Volksbund to relocate all German war graves in Canada to a single site in Kitchener.⁶ The seemingly simple rationale behind the proposal was that it would be useful to have the geographically scattered war graves, which were located in 36 cemeteries across seven provinces,⁷ relocated to one place for maintenance purposes. It was also argued that Kitchener was both ‘ethnically and geographically best suited’ as the location for the proposal.⁸ Accordingly, a letter of request was presented to Kitchener’s city council.

Reactions

Given historical sensitivities over the expression of German culture in a city that was once known as Berlin, it is perhaps not surprising that once the proposal had become publicly known the majority of the city’s aldermen ‘received telephone calls from residents objecting to the proposal’.⁹ Understanding public concern, Helmut Schmitz, who had been assigned the task of managing the war graves relocation project, promptly stated on behalf of the VDK that the commission was ‘not interested in erecting a war shrine of any type’.¹⁰ Rather, a part of Kitchener’s Woodland Cemetery was to be developed in such a way as to blend in with other sections. As with other military cemeteries overseen by the Volksbund, the German war graves section would be of a simple design.

Although the Waterloo Legion branch felt that there was ‘no longer reason for anti-German feelings’ and voted unanimously to support the proposal,¹¹ an alderman of the Jewish faith thought otherwise. During the city council debate on the war graves, Ald. Morley Rosenberg appealed against the relocation of the remains arguing, among other things, that it would amount to ‘setting up a shrine for Nazi Germany’ and would be ‘a slap in the face for those people who fought and died in the First and Second World Wars’.¹² While his comments sparked fierce debate within the council chamber, the motion to allow the project to go ahead was passed with several aldermen stating that ‘their approval [was] conditional that no attempts be made to turn a section of Woodland cemetery into a war shrine’.¹³

The council decision, and the opposing alderman’s statements in particular, sparked a series of letters to the editor of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record. Supporting the view of Ald. Rosenberg, who clarified his own objection in the newspaper, one resident wrote that the relocation of

the Nazi prisoner-of-war graves to a central place creates a memorial even if the idea of such a memorial is not the intention of the people promoting the move. By allowing this to happen are we not forgetting that Canada entered the war because she would not tolerate the Nazi ideologies of genocide, bigotry and mass murder?¹⁴

Another letter posed the questions,

How do we know that the proposed establishment of a special cemetery for the German war dead isn’t a step to create a kind of a shrine for a past that doesn’t deserve it? Why should this city bend and twist its own bylaws just to facilitate this undertaking, when the most appropriate place geographically and ethnically would be Germany where these men once lived? But there is nothing wrong with the present grave sites. These dead had decent burials and rest in peace, not like millions of the real war victims …¹⁵

Offended by the labelling of all of the PoWs as Nazis, several German-Canadians wrote in to denounce the ‘bitter attack’ on the proposal:

The allotment of a burial plot for these men, I submit, is no more creating a shrine for Nazi Germany than would be a similar allocation for the Jewish victims of German concentration camps. … Are not German prisoners of war people? Were all German soldiers (including those in the First World War) Nazi barbarians savagely goose-stepping their way to world domination[?]¹⁶

Reminding readers of the scale of postwar German immigration to the region, another individual asked whether the alderman would refuse his

professional services to any of the multitude of Kitchener residents who wore a German uniform during the war … These people are, after all, still alive while the unfortunate youngsters who occupy the graves and who had to march into war without fully realizing what it was all about, and whose final resting place is at issue here, paid the ultimate price many years ago.

Another letter referred to the decisions by the city council and Royal Canadian Legion not to voice objection over the transferral of the remains as having shown ‘maturity, wisdom and honour’.¹⁷

Transferring the remains

Despite some public opposition to the project, tension over the transfer of the war graves to Kitchener subsided. In July 1970, Helmut Schmitz presented each of the municipalities involved (e.g. Medicine Hat, Alberta; Iroquois Falls, Ontario) with a letter from the Department of National Defense approving the relocation of all of the graves – a total of 39 dating from WWI and 148 from WWII.¹⁸ Apart from some provincial red tape and challenges in the identification of several sets of remains, few problems were encountered in having the graves relocated. What was not known at the time or at least not made public in news reports were the stories surrounding several of the men whose remains would be reburied. In particular, some of the soldiers had been executed for murdering fellow PoWs. Specifically, Heinrich Busch, Willi Müller, Bruno Perzonowsky and Walter Wolf were all convicted of killing fellow PoW Dr Karl Lehmann on 10 October 1944 in Medicine Hat PoW Camp 132. Dr Lehmann, a professor of languages before the war, did not sympathize with the Nazi cause and was identified as a suspected traitor by these four men; he was beaten before being hanged. In late June 1946, Busch, Müller, Perzonowsky and Wolf were convicted of murder and were executed towards the end of the year in Lethbridge, Alberta.¹⁹ The murder of another PoW at the same camp a year before Lehmann’s death had led to the execution of another PoW whose remains would also be reinterred in Kitchener.

On 27 October 1970, an article in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record revealed that nearly all of the remains had been reburied in Kitchener’s Woodland Cemetery (Figure 2) and that a 7-foot granite cross (Photo 1) was expected to arrive. It would flank five rows of smaller white granite crosses, 94 in total, on each of which – save for one – would be inscribed the names, ranks, and dates of birth and death of two German soldiers (Photo 2). The Record also announced that a commemorative ceremony in Woodland Cemetery was already planned to coincide with the West German national day of mourning on 15 November.²⁰

Figure 2.

Location of the German War Graves in Woodland Cemetery.

Photo 1.

Large granite cross on the cemetery grounds. The German and English language plaque at its base reads, ‘In this cemetery section rest 187 German war dead 1914–18 + 1939–45 They were brought together in 1970 from 36 locations across Canada’ (Author’s photo).

Photo 2.

Rows of crosses to the German war dead (Author’s photo).

The first ceremony

With over 250 in attendance, the first German war graves ceremony in Kitchener’s Woodland Cemetery foreshadowed what has now become an annual event in the city that receives fairly regular newspaper coverage. The cool and windy Sunday afternoon ceremony began with the placement of a wreath at the base of the large granite cross by West German Consul-General for Ontario, Baron von Muellenheim-Rechberg. In addressing the predominantly German-Canadian crowd, the Consul-General, who had himself spent 4 years in Canada as a PoW, set the tone for future events by paying tribute not just to the German war dead of WWI and WWII who rest in Kitchener and in other parts of the world:

May the reminder which emanates from these graves to the living never be unheard … the admonition to intercede every time and everywhere to avoid a repeated genocide in the future. May future generations be spared the terrible experiences which ours have witnessed.

Speaking in German, the consular officer further stated,

We also remember all those who during the despotism have become victims of their conviction or faith, or who were killed because they were of another origin or belonged to another people. We also remember those men, women and children who in consequence of the war or the [postwar] partition of Germany have perished.²¹

Reverend Dr Finlay Stewart of St. Andrews Presbyterian Church spoke to the gathering of the Christian faith’s power to weld ‘together the family of men’ and turn enmity into co-operation, while reverend Joseph Schmeltz, who represented the region’s German Catholics, acknowledged the importance of the new central war graves site for the area’s German community:

it will become a focus and symbol for prayer and remembrance far more reaching than [its] relation to the 186 (sic) war prisoners who died in Canada. As a symbol, [the war graves] take the place for local German-Canadians of the graves of many relatives who lie in unknown or distant places in many lands.

Following the placing of two more wreaths by the Trans-Canada German Alliance and the German clubs of Kitchener-Waterloo, the local West German consul paid tribute to the war dead of all nations. As with all subsequent ceremonies, the male Concordia Club Choir then sang Friedrich Silcher’s popular rendition of Ludwig Uhland’s poem Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden, ‘I had a Comrade’.

The official dedication ceremony

A large photograph on the third page of the 25 May 1971 edition of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record shows an unidentified war widow paying tribute to the war dead in front of the sculptured granite memorial cross in the far corner of Woodland Cemetery. She was one of 108 West German citizens who had travelled to Kitchener for the official dedication ceremony of the German war graves. Approximately 500 residents, officials, and veterans were also in attendance at the hour-long ceremony. As reported in the newspaper,

Wreaths were placed at the memorial by the West German government, veteran groups, German-Canadian social clubs and private individuals. The federal republic was represented by charge d’affairs Wilhelm FaBricius, consul Wilfrid Bitzer and military attaché Col. G. E. Stamp. The federal government was represented by officials from the department of veteran affairs and Kitchener by Mayor McLennan. Delegations from the Royal Canadian Legion, the K-W Naval Veterans and the Highland Fusiliers of Canada, the local militia regiment, were also present.²²

The remembrance ceremony was conducted in German with sermons given by a Lutheran pastor and Roman Catholic priest. The participation of Canadian war veterans and government officials in the dedication ceremony lent itself to the event’s symbolic reconciliation theme between West Germany and Canada and between German and Canadian veterans. Dr Willi Thiele, the president of the VDK, maintained in his address that the cemetery would become a ‘monument of reconciliation’. He also called for a common day of remembrance to be established, one that ‘could express mutual and supranational efforts towards peace’. The graves of the war dead, he declared, demanded work towards this idea.

Since the first remembrance event, the German war graves have been visited each year in November by hundreds of German-Canadians on the German People’s Day of Mourning. As one reporter wrote in the late 1980s, ‘thousands [had] made the pilgrimage’ to the far end of the cemetery to lay wreaths of remembrance before the large granite cross.²³ And the reconciliatory theme persisted. Thus, during the 1977 Volkstrauertag, West German Ambassador Count Max von Podewils referred to the alliance that Canada and West Germany had formed which was built on maintaining the privilege of democracy. Addressing the estimated 200 in attendance in both German and English, Podewils remarked that the Kitchener audience ‘represented a small part of the millions of Germans mourning war casualties’ and that honour should be paid to ‘those who lost their lives on all sides “due to the rule of force, occupation or expulsion”’.²⁴

Often arriving from as far away as Ottawa and Windsor, the importance of the memorial for members of the German-Canadian community and veterans of the World Wars did not decline as indicated by attendance figures. As reported in the 15 November 1982 issue of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, about 1000 gathered around the German war graves for the ‘short’ but ‘dignified’ ceremony:

Many of those in the crowd of mostly older people shed tears quietly or bowed their heads respectfully as they recalled friends and loved ones who had perished during the war. Others, who did not personally suffer losses, came out of respect to the memory of people they never knew.²⁵

In his speech to the large crowd, West German Consul-General Ernst-Günter Koch stated that the ceremony was meant to honour not only the PoWs who died in internment camps but also the ‘victims of political tyranny’ and former enemies ‘who died for a good cause’. Significantly, unlike previous newspaper reports and likely reflecting the fact that West Germans were confronting the legacy of the Nazi past to a greater extent than before (Niven, 2006), the write-up on the 1982 ceremony also noted how the Consul-General had emphasized in the German portion of his speech that tribute should be paid foremost to ‘those who revolted against the Hitler tyranny’.²⁶ Similarly, a year later, the new West German ambassador to Canada, Wolfgang Behrends, maintained that the purpose of Volkstrauertag in Germany, as well as the Kitchener ceremony, was to remember those who died in WWI and WWII ‘and the people who died opposing Nazi tyranny’.²⁷ Referring to ‘the sense of responsibility that the memory of World War II entails’, he likewise quoted in 1989, and again in 1990, a passage from a speech given by Chancellor Helmut Kohl on remembrance and the lessons of war: ‘Remembering the innocent victims means keeping the horror in our minds, keeping it present as it were. It must always serve as a warning to us’.²⁸ Of course, for most in attendance, the importance of the event was tied to more immediate, personal issues. For some, the event was a time to reflect on their fortune in simply having survived the war. For others, like a former German paratrooper at the 1984 ceremony, it was an occasion to pay tribute to a friend who lay in the war grave plot. Certainly, the German war graves ceremony was also an important occasion for many Canadian veterans of WWII who attended the memorial event each year. In the company of the former German paratrooper, a 79-year-old former Canadian army engineer remarked, ‘We’re all here together, working together, raising children together. This is peace’.²⁹ Kitchener’s German War Graves was clearly serving a similar function to the Cowra Japanese War Cemetery in Australia, which Kobayashi and Ziino (2009) argue ‘offers a place where two peoples can confront and negotiate the pain of that past on personal and public levels’ (p. 112).

A site of contestation?

In the late 1980s and over the course of the 1990s, many books and documentaries began to appear on the wartime suffering of the German people. Moeller (2005) points out in his article ‘Germans as victims?’ that while the Holocaust emerged from the 1960s onward as the ‘defining moment of twentieth-century German history’, by the mid-1980s historians began to also address the sufferings of Germans in WWII (pp. 147–149). In fact, one of the more prominent works to appear on this highly charged and contentious topic originated in Canada. Other Losses (1989) by Toronto-based author James Bacque was more than controversial; in it, Bacque claimed that on the direction of Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower, some 1 million German PoWs had died from starvation or exposure in American and French internment camps at the end of the war. In addition, the 1992 episode ‘Death by Moonlight’ in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation TV series, ‘The Valour and the Horror’, drew attention to Allied bombing campaigns and the purposeful targeting of civilian populations. Not surprisingly, some of these works cropped up from time to time in the local newsprint including, as will be seen, references to Bacque’s work during the coverage of the annual event. Likely reflecting the shift in historiography towards addressing the sufferings of Germans, by 1987 the German Ambassador to Canada had to remind the gathering in Woodland Cemetery that ‘politics and the passions of war have no place at the front of the graves’, a statement that he was to also make the following year after an unexpected and unwelcome visit.³⁰

Thirty minutes before the beginning of the 1988 German war graves ceremony, a small group ‘marched to the German war graves, blew a bugle and lowered a flag’.³¹ The small group was led by Ernst Zündel, a well-known German Holocaust denier and resident of Toronto at the time, who had recently been sentenced to 9 months in jail for disseminating hate literature. Although Zündel and his followers left the cemetery before most of the spectators for the official ceremony had arrived, his presence in Kitchener and in particular his counter-ceremony at Woodland Cemetery shocked residents, local organizers, and members of the German-Canadian Congress and West German consulate. The West German ambassador told a local newspaper reporter after the event that Zündel’s ceremony was ‘in very bad taste’ and that there ‘was no place for him to be here’. Some people who arrived early for the official ceremony assumed the small gathering was part of the service. A short speech by Zündel that contained his ‘usual trivia’ had ‘opened some wounds’ as one woman stated. Later asked by phone why he had visited Kitchener, Zündel told a reporter that he was ‘sick and tired’ of the way that the ‘traitorous West German regime’ and the media represented German history and that he wanted to speak up on behalf of the soldiers buried in the German war graves.³²

Nearly a year after the ‘surprise action’, the German community of Kitchener was joyfully greeting news of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the prospect of East and West Germany’s unification. For the first time, the East German Ambassador to Canada was invited and initially agreed to attend the event. However, he subsequently sent his regrets to the Trans-Canadian Alliance of German-Canadians. Apparently, ‘the welcome mat had been pulled out from under him by the West Germans and their concern over a breach of protocol’.³³ At the ceremony, the West German ambassador commented during his speech on the exciting developments that were unfolding in East Germany: ‘We have witnessed the strength of the ideal of freedom which breaks walls and iron curtains … Freedom is infectious. I’m certain that similar developments will happen everywhere in the world’.³⁴

However, the war remembrance ceremony of 1989 did not escape controversy. At the apparent request of several upset attendants, Kitchener’s Member of Parliament (MP), John Reimer removed a sign from a wreath laid in front of a private plot. The sign read ‘1,000,000 German PoWs murdered by Eisenhower after World War II’. For many of the attendants later interviewed, Reimer’s action ‘had gone too far’ since the sign was based on something that had ‘already been revealed’ in a book (Other Losses). Stating that he was ‘trying to solve a problem, not create one’, Reimer responded to the backlash by saying that the purpose of the ceremony was not to raise old grievances.³⁵ A year later, the MP placed one of 30 wreaths at the base of the central cross, but there was no repeat of the previous year’s ‘incident’.³⁶ In fact, no other notable incident to challenge the hegemonic narrative of the annual event has occurred since the ‘Reimer incident’.

Post-reunification period to the present

In her recent studies on the evolution of Volkstrauertag in Germany, Kaiser (2008, 2010) has highlighted how the conception of Volkstrauertag broadened to commemorate all victims of war. However, she notes that the more inclusive approach to Volkstrauertag failed to influence the great majority of remembrance events. In particular, she quotes a statement made by German historian Ute Frevert: ‘The greater the distance to the capital, the more the commemoration became restricted to the fallen soldier’ (Kaiser, 2010: 21). Moreover, she argues that the official ‘all-victims-together model’ has been disintegrating since the unification of East and West Germany (Kaiser, 2008). Kaiser points to the inauguration of the new Commemoration Day for the Victims of National Socialism (Gedenktag für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus) in 1996 as evidence that Volkstrauertag ‘never achieved acceptance as a commemoration day for all victims’. She further concludes that despite the unchanged ‘all-victims’ language of the Volksbund, the event itself had ‘reverted – almost automatically – to the function it had always retained at a local level: the (exclusive) commemoration of the German dead’ (Kaiser, 2010: 21).

The all-victims-of-war model of commemoration that had been transferred to Kitchener some two decades prior to Germany’s reunification period has, however, been nurtured to this day. Certainly, the speech given in 1990 by Wolfgang Behrends, ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Canada, used similar verbiage to previous addresses. References were made to the ‘sacred duty to preserve peace and freedom’ and to the symbolism of the graves that stood for millions of war graves around the world. Behrends added, ‘coming generations will someday judge us by whether we drew the right conclusions from the war and dictatorship and whether we have lived up to the task of creating a better and more peaceful world’.³⁷ The following year, an addition was made to the narrative: Dr Richard Ellerkmann, the new ambassador to Canada from unified Germany, honoured the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping soldier. Specifically, he argued that members of UN peacekeeping missions had the important task of protecting those facing racial and political persecution.³⁸ Dr Ellerkmann’s message was recalled in subsequent events. For example, Dr Hans-Günter Sulimma, the next German ambassador to Canada, stated 2 years later,

Today we honour those who suffered and died in the two world wars and other wars, and all the victims of tyranny and persecution. At the same time we remember the soldiers of the United Nations peacekeeping forces, in particular, the members of the Canadian Armed Forces. … This German-Canadian cemetery is a place of mourning, but it is also a place of conciliation of friendship and of hope.³⁹

A year later, Dr Sulimma specifically referred to the role of Canadian soldiers in liberating Germany and added that Germans ‘owe them an enormous debt of gratitude’.⁴⁰ Speeches delivered in subsequent events such as the 1998 Volkstrauertag emphasized the need to honour those ‘who fought against the tyranny of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler’ as well as those who suffered persecution.⁴¹ And, in 2000, the presence of Canadian war veterans was highlighted.⁴²

In 2001, the focus of the event was not so much on the victims of the World Wars but of those who died in the 11th September terrorist attacks. Consul-General of Germany, Ulrich Hochschild stated, ‘Let us remember the war dead of all wars, and, especially in this time, let us commemorate those who fell victim to terrorist attacks’.⁴³ Two years later, Mrs Marianne Bath, Deputy Consul-General of Germany, spoke of the importance to honour those who died in peacekeeping missions as well as those who died as a result of terrorism.⁴⁴ By 2006, the speeches in Woodland Cemetery were now referring to military fatalities in Afghanistan, as well as of the need to keep the memory of the horrors of war alive.⁴⁵ In 2010, Gerhard Griebenow of the German War Remembrance Society emphasized that while the proportion of those in attendance who had experienced the last World War was continuing to decline, ‘we have witnessed its effects on our parents and grandparents. The loss of the old homeland through expulsion and the postwar chaos in Germany will definitely be forever engraved in our memory’.⁴⁶ In an emotional speech, he then turned the audience’s attention (Photo 3) to the need to pay respect to the Canadian fallen in Afghanistan:

Today, we also mourn the young Canadians who lost their lives recently as representatives of our country in peacekeeping missions and in Afghanistan. A hundred and fifty two young men were torn from their lives, from their loved ones prematurely, and many more were badly injured. We include their families in our prayers.

Photo 3.

A member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in ceremonial uniform pays respect to the war dead (Author’s photo).

As with every ceremony, dignitaries from all levels of government were present, as were members of the Royal Canadian Legion, German consulate, and German Federal Defense Force. A Lutheran pastor dedicated the memorial with a prayer ‘for peace, for guidance and for [God’s] continued blessing’, while a Catholic priest, originally from Poland, asked the audience to ‘pray for peace in the world, and reconciliation between nations’.

A sacralized space of memory, but for how long?

As revealed earlier on in this study, the proposal to reinter the remains of German PoWs to Kitchener, the symbolic German capital of Canada, was not unproblematic and did not go unchallenged. However, tensions over the proposal subsided, due likely to the guarantee made by proponents of the plan that the German War Graves would not become a war shrine. Experts in collective memory studies have long noted that often what is absent is equally as important as what is present. That is, the elision of memory is often as important as what is actively remembered (Ricoeur, 2004; Rowlands, 1999). Certainly, it is more than probable that the either purposeful or unknowing silence surrounding at least five of the individuals whose remains were to be reburied in Kitchener helped lessen any additional opposition against the proposal. What is clear is that no matter whose names are inscribed on the granite crosses in the far corner of Woodland Cemetery, the German War Graves became for many a sanctified site of yearly pilgrimage.

Eschebach (2011) defines sacralization as ‘a cultural technique for creating sanctity used both by religious institutions and secular social and political groups of people as a form of dealing with historical events’ (p. 134). Furthermore, she argues in her case study of a former concentration camp that the development of a memorial at such a site can be interpreted as a process of sacralization. In cases where there are no remains, the last place to where the dead were taken often ‘become crucial for the memory of the deceased’ (Eschebach, 2011: 136). As with most war memorials, such places become symbolic ‘empty graves’ for the relatives of the dead (Stephens, 2006). In a similar vein, the defined space of memory in Kitchener’s Woodland Cemetery became a surrogate place for postwar German immigrants in Kitchener-Waterloo and beyond to mourn lost relatives and friends. In this sense, the site can be interpreted not only as a sacralized space of memory but also as a therapeutic memorial.

While Kaiser (2008, 2010) has argued that Volkstrauertag in Germany has reverted back to the interwar era focus on the German war dead since reunification, the same cannot be said about the Kitchener ceremony. Although the meaning of the site was briefly contested in the late 1980s by unwelcome members of the far-right via a counter-ceremony as well as to a lesser extent by a local politician’s decision to remove a controversial wreath, the event has remained true to the postwar ‘all-victims of war and violence’ narrative that was originally cultivated in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. This narrative certainly fits well with the centrality of pluralism and myth of tolerance in the cultural politics of Canadian identity (Mackey, 2013: 383), and Kitchener’s German War Graves continues to serve as an important place for Canadians of German and to a lesser extent non-German ethnic backgrounds to reflect on the horrors of all wars. One of the slogans of Volkstrauertag has been ‘reconciliation over the graves’ (Livingstone, 2010). While the Kitchener event played a symbolic role in fostering reconciliation between former foes, understandably only a few surviving veterans of the WWII can now be seen at the event.

Kaiser (2010) maintains that in Germany, ‘The significance of the Volkstrauertag at the local level has receded with fading memories of the Second World War. Today it is largely the elderly who attend local ceremonies’ (p. 22). The passing of those who experienced the war either as adults or children has also impacted attendance numbers at Kitchener’s Volkstrauertag. Whereas some 1000 people attended the local event during the years immediately before and after Germany’s reunification, more recent ceremonies have typically drawn about a quarter of that number. The very latest remembrance event (2013), however, attracted some 500 people,⁴⁷ and the head of the Ontario chapter of the German-Canadian Congress was quoted as saying that ‘crowds … are bigger now than they were a decade ago’.⁴⁸ Whatever the case, with recent developments in the ‘memory boom’ (Inglis, 2008; Winter, 2006), a complex global phenomenon that sees a growing curiosity towards history and memory often by those without any connection to war, perhaps the annual pilgrimage to the secluded corner of Woodland Cemetery will increasingly be made by the grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of veterans of both sides. Certainly, the recent formation of a local German-Canadian Remembrance Society and its recruitment of young individuals to tend to the cleaning of the war graves bodes well for the continuation of Canada’s Volkstrauertag for some time to come.⁴⁹

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Brian S. Osborne as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. He also acknowledges Jeffrey W. Cable’s help in constructing the map that appears in this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Jason F Kovacs is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Jason’s academic interests lie in the diverse but complementary research fields of public memory, urban cultural policy, and heritage planning.

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