"When France's second-last surviving veteran from World War I, Louis de Cazenave, died Jan. 20, the news made international headlines.
But in Germany — which lost both world wars and has had to cope with the shame of the Nazi genocide for more than six decades — there is not even an organization keeping track of the remaining veterans.
"That is the way history has developed," Kaestner's son, Peter Kaestner, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "In Germany, in this respect, these things are kept quiet — they're not a big deal."
The news did not even trickle out into the German press until this week, and the stories were more about how Germans remember than about Kaestner's death itself.
"The losers hide themselves in a state of self-pity and self-denial that they happily try to mitigate by forgetting," the daily Die Welt wrote Friday in its obituary for Kaestner.
Der Spiegel magazine noted that "the German public was within a hair's breadth of never learning of the end of an era" until someone who had read Kaestner's death notice in a newspaper figured out who he was and updated a Wikipedia entry on the Internet."
Story Link:
http://www.rawstory.com/news/mochila/Last_German_World_War_I_veteran_die_01252008.html
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