In the months and even years following World War II, the unburied remains of war dead were so common place throughout Europe that unless they posed a health hazard, they were often simply ignored.
In some places the dead of enemy nations were discarded in out of sight heaps, either through bitterness, or a desire to brush aside any reminder of war and death.
For one man, however, the dead deserved a proper burial. Even if he had to do it himself.
Julius Erasmus-The Grave Digger of Hürtgenwald
Born in Aachen on February 16, 1895, Julius Erasmus was employed before the war as a textile manufacturer. He later entered service with the Wehrmacht and rose to the rank of Captain with an engineer unit which took part in the battle in the Hurtgenforest, not far from his place of birth.
But it was not Erasmus' service in arms that made him an honored hero in Germany. It was what he did after the war.
In the summer if 1945, former POW Erasmus returned home to find that his entire family had been killed during the Battle of Aachen. All his possessions, his home, had been either looted or destroyed.
Despondent, he moved into a small abandoned cabin in the Hürtgenwald, where he had served only a few months before and the scene of some of the most horrific fighting of World War II.
But Erasmus was not alone. All along roadside ditches into town, beneath the artillery torn trees and clumps of forest underbrush were the dead.
"I couldn't stand seeing them lying around there, unburied and forgotten," Erasmus was quoted as saying in a postwar newspaper interview. "It kept bothering me."
Erasmus began, on his own, to collect and bury dead soldiers of any nation that he found and took pains to try and identify each so as to put a name to the grave.
He buried the first 120 bodies on the edges of the forest, until the local community gave him a plot of land, located on what was then known on military maps as Hill 470, one of the hardest fought areas of the battle.
As Erasmus worked on to bury the dead in the heat of the summer of 1945, residents from surrounding towns and villages began to join him. At first in ones and twos, then in small groups that eventually grew into a army of volunteers.
The work was hard, emotionally draining and dangerous. An estimated 100 volunteers died while locating and burying the dead due to mines and unexploded ordinance. Including Baptist Linzenich, mayor of Vossenack.
By the time the German Military Cemetery at Vossenack was officially designated by the then West German Government in 1952, it was estimated that Julius Erasmus personally buried, or assisted in the burial of, 1569 fallen soldiers.
As the Hürtgenwald continues to surrender its dead from the battle fought there, and others continue the work started by Julius Erasmus, the number of soldiers now laid to rest at Vossenack number 2221, representing four nations, with 930 unknown.
The German Military Cemetery at Vossenack
As for Julius Erasmus, believing his work completed in 1952 he simply vanished without a trace, becoming something of a national enigma. It was only in recent years discovered that he had died September 3, 1971, in Nideggen-Abenden in the Eifel Mountains.
Today a monument to the memory of Julius Erasmus stands in the cemetery at Vossenackto he started with his own two hands.
A tribute to a solider who lost everyone and everything to war, yet took it upon himself to see that the dead, including former enemies, were given a proper burial.
