In October 1939, two coffins were wheeled through Edinburgh draped in Nazi flags. But why?

International law stated the enemy needed to be “honourably buried”, but a grand military funeral was never a part of the deal. If it was not a question of legality, then, what had encouraged such fanfare in Edinburgh?

The real motive, it seems, was to be found over in Nazi Germany. During the first days of the conflict, several British airmen had lost their lives in a series of audacious RAF raids on Germany’s North Sea ports. Determined to showcase an honourable side, the Nazi regime staged its own elaborate funerals in the coastal town of Wilelmshaven, Lower Saxony. A naval band, floral tributes and military pallbearers were all present as the British dead were laid to rest. After the Germans had thrown down this mortuary gauntlet, the British clearly decided they had little option but to follow suit.

These funerals shed light on an important, though largely overlooked, aspect of the two world wars: the enemy dead. During both conflicts, enemy soldiers and civilians lost their lives on the British and German home fronts. Roughly 2,700 Germans died in First World War Britain and around 4,500 in the second conflict. When it came to British deaths in Germany, the numbers were even higher: 6,500 in the Great War and more than 25,000 from 1939–45.

Us and them

Both societies have been very good at commemorating their own wartime losses. Such concerns have rarely stretched to the lives lost from the other side – perhaps for understandable reasons. Yet behind every enemy funeral and every enemy grave also lies a wider history of loss, grief and broken families.

During the Second World War, the majority of enemy deaths on the home front occurred in the air. The impressive funerals in Edinburgh and Wilhelmshaven were for airmen who were shot down in the skies over Britain and Germany. The balance of deaths in the First World War, however, where air combat played a much smaller role, was very different. In this earlier conflict, the largest number of enemy deaths occurred in PoW camps. But even then, given the vast size of the British and German camp networks, the numbers were still small.

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Accidents, sickness and disease were the most common causes of mortality in PoW camps. One of those to suffer such a fate was 26-year-old Friedrich Borutta, a German prisoner originally from industrial Bochum. As a PoW, he ended up in Kinlochleven, a community just south of Ben Nevis. According to a Red Cross report, Borutta was “killed instantaneously” in October 1916, when he “was struck on [the] head by a portion of a hut” as a storm ripped through the Kinlochleven working camp. Some months later, in March 1917, another young German, Eugen Baumann, died in Middlesbrough. A lump of metal “the size of a man’s fist” struck his head while he was labouring away on a massive slag heap.

What proved even more deadly for PoWs in both countries was the global influenza pandemic of 1918–19. The tight confines of the camps offered the virus rich pickings. Yorkshire’s Skipton camp was among those to feel the full force of the disease: 47 men lost their lives in little more than three weeks.

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Over in Germany, the influenza pandemic was also a killer, but so too were the poor sanitary conditions that reigned in many camps. One of the very worst places to be held was probably the Wittenberg camp, where typhus started to spread during the first half of 1915. But it was the German response, or lack of it, that caused the greatest problems.

Fearing they would become infected, the guards effectively abandoned the camp, only passing basic supplies through the border fence. At the peak of the typhus epidemic, the men were living in squalor, “alive with vermin” as a UK parliamentary committee reported. The “horrors of Wittenberg” left 60 British and 400 other PoWs dead.

A duty of care

Regardless of how the enemy died in the two world wars, the British and German authorities faced the same issue. With every death, they inherited another body that required some form of burial. One option was to create special cemeteries reserved solely for the enemy dead. However, this required time, effort and money, all of which were in short supply in wartime.

Nonetheless, a handful of new cemeteries were developed, including one in Wittenberg for the typhus victims. In Britain, new PoW burial grounds were built for the Stobs camp in the Scottish borders and the Park Hall camp near Oswestry, where a large memorial mound cast a watchful shadow over the 109 German graves.

A second option for the burial of enemy bodies – which became by far the most common approach – was to make use of existing cemeteries. After all, there seemed little reason to create a brand new burial ground if there was already plenty of space in nearby parish churchyards or in municipal cemeteries.

The recovery and burial of a German bomber crew who had lost their lives in Withyham, Sussex in 1941 was fairly typical of the process. The aircraft, a Heinkel He 111, was returning to base from a bombing raid over London when a British fighter attacked. Two crew members bailed out and another three died as the aircraft smashed into the ground.

Some “not identifiable” remains, as the police report put it, were pulled from the “burnt-out machine” and subsequently buried in Withyham parish churchyard. A fourth German – one of the men to have bailed out – died on the way to hospital in Tunbridge Wells and was then buried in the town’s municipal cemetery.

During the two world wars, the burial of the enemy in local cemeteries, such as Withyham and Tunbridge Wells, occurred time and again. Sometimes it was just the odd grave that appeared. In King’s Lynn, for example, the remains of Frank Zielenski, another victim of the influenza pandemic, lay quietly in the town’s main cemetery, surrounded by ordinary family graves. In other burial grounds, the enemy had a much greater presence: Manchester’s Southern Cemetery contained 154 German dead from the First World War, later joined by eight servicemen from the Second.

Simmering anger

After the two conflicts, more than 700 different British cemeteries contained enemy graves. There is no accurate number for Germany, but given the scale of death, the numbers must have been even greater.

Eighteen-year-old Donald Stephens died in Landshut, north of Munich in September 1918, a matter of weeks before the end of the war. Buried in the town’s wooded cemetery, Stephens rested inconspicuously alongside German family graves. He was far from alone: fallen British soldiers lay scattered in hundreds of cemeteries in the heart of local German communities.

Coming face to face with a dead enemy was certainly less threatening than confronting a live one. Perhaps for this reason, local people rarely put up too much of a fuss when their vanquished foe was carried to the grave in their own communities. One Dorset woman watching the burial of a German PoW in First World War Dorchester captured the sentiment of many people. “I only hope that in Germany they treat our men as well and pay as much respect to those who die,” she shouted out as the coffin was carried to the grave.

However, not every funeral passed off without anger being expressed. The strongest complaints were generally reserved for airmen killed in bombing raids. In Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, according to a police report, the vicar found himself “threatened with a riot” after he agreed to the burial of “German murderers” in September 1916. The 15 men in question were the crew of a raiding German airship that had been shot down in flames in neighbouring Cuffley. Meanwhile, one Newcastle resident was so incensed at the scale of a German funeral held locally that he vented his anger in the press. “It is time we treated these men for what they are: cold blooded murderers,” he raged.

As the Allied bombing of German urban areas intensified, any empathy with dead or dying enemy airmen also quickly faded. In Nazi Germany, people’s anger sometimes went far beyond a letter to the local newspaper. When a Lancaster bomber hit the ground in the tiny village of Schlalach, south of Potsdam, in 1943, there was very little left of the “badly burned” crew. Yet the attacks still continued. Some local workers took the corpses to the village churchyard, where they threw the bodies into a mass grave, imitating “the noise of falling bombs” as each body hit the ground.

Commemorating the enemy

In both 1918 and 1945, when the fighting finally stopped, wartime societies, militaries and economies were gradually demobilised. Yet, while the living could slowly return, the dead remained overseas, scattered in local cemeteries from Aldershot to York and Aachen to Xanten. But what was to happen to these enemy graves post-conflict? Unsurprisingly, many of the bereaved were desperate to have their loved ones’ bodies brought home.

Elizabeth Stark’s circumstances were particularly sad. In September 1918, her son James had succumbed to wounds while being held in Cologne. A few weeks later her husband also died. She then made it her mission to “get their boy’s body home” to Dundee. Despite years of campaigning, she eventually had to admit defeat. Her husband’s headstone in Scotland contains a dedication to their son, but his body remained in Germany.

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While discussions over the possible repatriation of the enemy dead rumbled on, the graves themselves started to enjoy a second life. This came down to having a presence. People found it difficult to ignore the enemy, when their graves were still in the midst of communities. One Suffolk soldier, Willie Read, had perished in the influenza pandemic and lay buried in the town of Rüthen. A local farmer, who had employed Read, promised his family he would keep the grave “in proper condition”.

Sometimes, local people included the enemy in their early war commemorations. The 14 German dead in Birmingham’s Lodge Hill cemetery, for example, were treated the same as the neighbouring British war graves. On Armistice Day during the 1920s, wreaths were laid on both sets of graves. It was, the German embassy proclaimed somewhat optimistically, a “sign of the growing mutual understanding between the nations of Europe”.

With local communities taking such a close interest in the care of enemy graves, direct contact between the former foes often followed. One of the most poignant stories emerged on the south coast of England, where 11 German airmen of the Second World War lay buried in Poole’s Parkstone Cemetery. Frau Koch, the widow of Horst Gündel, one of those killed, made regular trips to the cemetery postwar. On one of these visits, she ended up in conversation with a local man. The pair kept in touch and a warm friendship developed. They exchanged letters and Christmas cards, arranged flowers for Gündel’s grave and their families stayed together on holiday.

New resting places

Yet these warm relations were not to last. While the British and Germans were busy bonding over the enemy war graves, the authorities started to plot a very different future for the dead. Both sides eventually decided to move their graves from hundreds of scattered sites to a far smaller number of new military cemeteries, which gathered together the fallen on foreign soil.

On paper, there was a lot of logic to such plans. It brought each country’s dead together for the first time – and, of course, centralising the graves also cut down on maintenance costs. The knock-on effect, however, was that once the graves were gone, the bereaved no longer needed to visit communities that had once cared for the dead. And thus, these early relations slowly fizzled out.

The enemy graves vanished from the cemetery landscapes at different times. The British moved first, exhuming all their dead in Germany in two large waves, one in the mid-1920s and one in the late 1940s for the Second World War graves. These were massive operations. The exhumation teams often covered hundreds of miles in a day, moving tens of bodies each time. “With such enormous distances,” as one of the gravediggers later recalled, “our lives seemed to revolve round transport.”

Yet, while the British dead were gradually moved, there was no such progress with the scattered German graves. This was not for a lack of trying. The problem for successive German governments was that, as the vanquished power, they had less control of the graves in Britain. It was only in 1959 that the situation finally changed: a new international treaty gave the West German state permission to exhume all German graves on British soil.

The West Germans welcomed this development as a sign of rehabilitation. Of course, this rather overlooked the fact that many of the German dead had led anything but normal lives. On the one side were unsavoury characters such as Maximilian von Herff (1893–1945), a Waffen-SS general who had died after suffering a stroke while being held as a PoW in Cumbria. On the other side were the graves of refugees who had fled the Nazis and been interned, only then to lose their lives in wartime Britain.

Such complexities were of little concern when the gravediggers set to work. The Germans moved all of their dead to a new military cemetery on Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, matching the British who had developed four cemeteries for their First World dead (in Berlin Stahnsdorf, Cologne, Hamburg and Kassel), with 11 more added after the second conflict.

Today, the enemy dead lie quietly in these vast cemeteries, all beautifully tended by the British and German war graves commissions. Few now remember that the enemy graves were anywhere other than on Cannock Chase or in one of the British cemeteries on German soil. In Edinburgh, Poole or Wilhelmshaven, there is no longer any sign of the enemy. Their graves, now long gone, had once been a prompt for British-German reconciliation and a reminder of shared losses, even of crimes committed. Without the enemy in the way, the British and Germans have been free to concentrate on constructing national, rather than shared, narratives of the two world wars.

Tim Grady is professor of modern European history at the University of Chester and author of Burying the Enemy: The Story of Those Who Cared for the Dead in Two World Wars (Yale University Press)

This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine