The Battle of the Seelow Heights

I had read this good book about the Battle of Berlin, so I wanted to come here. About 70 years and 3 weeks ago, the Red Army crossed the River Oder near the town of Frankfurt (the small town Frankfurt near Berlin, not the big-city Frankfurt down south) on their way to take Berlin, and days of bitter fighting (click here) ensued.

Today I took the train from Berlin to Frankfurt an der Oder. Until WWII it was just a town in the middle of northeastern Germany, nowhere near any foreign country. Today, you can walk across the downtown bridge into Poland. It only takes an hour to get there from Berlin, and costs €20 round trip. 

In Frankfurt I boarded the bus to Seelow village to the north, then walked about a mile to the Seelow Heights battle museum. It's surrounded by military graveyards, and was established by the post-war Soviet occupiers as a memorial to the "Red Army's glorious liberation of Germany from fascist Nazism." Now it has morphed into a plain old battle museum, but the tanks, guns, and rocket launchers displayed outside are Red Army ones.

I ran into a snaggle-toothed old Russian guy from Leningrad -- um, that is, from "Zankt Pyetyerboork," outside among the weaponry, and we chatted in Russian and German. We took pictures of one another with one another's cameras (his camera had roll film in it).

Since he was a snaggle-toothed old Russian I somehow had the goofy urge (which I fortunately resisted) to ask him if he had fought in the battle. It turned out he was the exact same age as me, which

means that both him and the snaggle-toothed American (me) were going-on-two years old and pooping their diapers on opposite sides of the world, as the desperate and agonizing three-day bloodbath took place.

There are organizations that are still digging up bodies in the woods all around this area, and trying to identify them and find their next-of-kin.