Looks like a Russia-Poland spat will be flaring up since Russia will undoubtedly stick its nose where it doesn't belong.

Link

Poland on Collision Course with Russia over Plans to Remove Soviet Statues

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There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush.

We are at war with forces too terrible to comprehend. We cannot afford mercy for any of its victims too weak to take the correct course. Mercy destroys us; it weakens us and saps our resolve. Put aside all such thoughts. They are not worthy of those in the service of country.

There is difference between the statues and graves. And intention to desacrify the graves of our 600 000 fallen soldiers despite the clear international laws IS OUR BUSINESS, as well as everybody else's who cares about strong and respectful international laws.
Your nick doesn't fit you, cause Thor and Odin are ancient gods respecting war glory and death in battle before all other things. Neither you, nor your ancestors ever been the warriors, and the graves of those gone to Valhalla are always painful for cowards. I doubt as well that you have German roots, because Germans had especial attitude to the Soldatenpflicht including the brave enemy. Don't let the German-sounding surname to mislead you. A couple centuries ago the German surname helped many immigrant groups to move and accomodate across the Europe. In any case your mental tradition doesn't belong to the European North.

Who said anything about moving graves? I sure as hell didn't, and neither does the proposed law. Congrats on turning this into something it isn't, and on launching attacks on my ancestry.

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There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush.

We are at war with forces too terrible to comprehend. We cannot afford mercy for any of its victims too weak to take the correct course. Mercy destroys us; it weakens us and saps our resolve. Put aside all such thoughts. They are not worthy of those in the service of country.

aye - I read that post thinking what the hell is he talking about...

I help you understand. The Soviet Army moved across Poland. There was the directive to to save cultural legacy and as many lives of civilians as possible. Therefore the nice Polish cities like Krakov were not bombarded and demolished to ashes before assault, those cities were taken clean with the infantry detachments. Without avia or artillery rushes the German positions in the cities stood undamaged and strong, this caused great losses among our troops.
The second. The streets were jammed with bodies and at high speed of move westward some small platoons buried their comrades right on the town-squares or cross-roads. The statues or the tanks were mounted on those graves after the war and the places became the shrines. There are tens thousands of such shrines everythere. For instance such monument stands on the grave of my uncle and his tank crew far away in Ukraine.
The bronze soldier in Tallinn was one of such soldier-shrines, it contained 12 warriors.
Now I make clear the difference between the monument and the grave especially for you. There were lots of communist-monuments like statues or baureliefs of Lenin. They were put on the empty places just to glorify communist ideology. All they were removed long ago. Now the goverments of some EU-member countries are going to destroy soldier-GRAVES even if they say those are Communist STATUES.
The american, canadian and british vets, those who smelled the powder in Normandia are fully on our side, German vets too, in other word everyone who fought and was the part of soldier brotherhood. Those who want to dig the bones are descendants of cowards and rascals who all the war seeked the stronger side to join, who helped to kill Jews in Warsaw ghetto in safety far behind the Wehrmacht frontline, who betrayed the Reich at the first danger, flipped to the other side and now scapegoats Germany calling themselves the victor-countries.

Can anyone clarify exactly what are these statues?
I took it as they were Stalin or Leningrad statues etc.
But I see one statue is a memorial to fallen Red Army troops during WWII...I would agree taking that statue/memorial down is a form of desecration, or at the least a slap in the face to those soldiers who died there.

Why is there no compromise?
Could the statues not be moved to Moscow?

So you are going off pure speculation and paranoia? No where in the proposed law does it allow the removal of graves.

Lets say, for the sake of argument, that it does allow the removal of remains. If the Poles take the same action of the Estonians and move the graves to a military cemetary, would you have a problem with it?

Also, I still fail to see what my ancestry has to do with any of this.

EDIT: Could you provide me with a link showing American, Brit, Canadian, and German vets who are on your side.

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There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush.

We are at war with forces too terrible to comprehend. We cannot afford mercy for any of its victims too weak to take the correct course. Mercy destroys us; it weakens us and saps our resolve. Put aside all such thoughts. They are not worthy of those in the service of country.

Many do not view the Russian soldiers as "liberators".

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There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush.

We are at war with forces too terrible to comprehend. We cannot afford mercy for any of its victims too weak to take the correct course. Mercy destroys us; it weakens us and saps our resolve. Put aside all such thoughts. They are not worthy of those in the service of country.

The laws don't allow the removal or replacing of any remains without permission of relatives. Moving the graves to military cemetery is normal process, Russia and Germany go on the collaboration on the searching the remains, excavation and settling the soldier cemeteries. Excluding few cases, the relatives prefer their grandfathers sleep where they have fallen. All this is a very delicate issue.
Now what was done by the Estonian government? They designed all the incident as deliberate insult to the Russian minority in their country. The officials openly declared that those DRUNKEN MARAUDERS must be replaced from the city and that they don't want to allow any ceremonies in that place. The stream of direct insults against Russian etnicity came along with the demonstrative preparations despite the massive protests not to speak about absense of any demands of relatives. They sought the sensitive spot to hit the Russian community and escalate the protests.
Many American soldiers are buried on special cemetery in France. When the US and France want to outline the old friendly ties, their presidents meet on the flag ceremony on that cemetery. Now imagine the French goverment would declare that American soldiers descended on Omaha beach were drunken marauders who killed many French patriots of Vichi-regime and it wants to replace and scatter their rests from the old place on to the small wretched military cemeteries all over the France. Imagine this act would come along with glorifying the French SS legion and media-campaign of fierce bashing of American participation in WW2.

I already said - nothing, calm down. Your ancestry has nothing to do with any of this. The families whose ancestors were soldiers of the WW are not proportionally numerous in the US. You are the alien observer. Wherever and whatever bad is done to Russia is good and fair. Any indignation of Russian side is imperialism an that's all.

Could you tell me what law that is? Perhaps provide a link? If you are going to cite international law you should be made aware that domestic law trumps international law, and the movement of the statue and remains was the right of Estonia as a sovereign and indepentent state.

So this was all one big conspiracy against Russians? Please. They removed a statue and remains that were used by ultranationalist groups (both Russian and Estonian). How can you, or Russians for that matter, be against moving those remains to a place where they can rest in peace?

Personally, I have no problem with monuments for Waffen-SS units/members. Most fought bravely and skillfully, and with honor. That being said, the advance of American troops into France was not characterized by the rape, looting, and all around barbarity that seemed to come along with Russian advances in the east. Therefore, your point of American graves in France is moot because the circumstances were quite different.

I am quite calm, but I do recall you making a direct attack against me on the subject of my ancestry.

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There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush.

We are at war with forces too terrible to comprehend. We cannot afford mercy for any of its victims too weak to take the correct course. Mercy destroys us; it weakens us and saps our resolve. Put aside all such thoughts. They are not worthy of those in the service of country.

This law exists and the Russian-German search groups use it's regulations for decades in their job.
The American Journal of International Law is more likely source for your curiosity. But I'd remark, that the majority International laws are instanced from the European institutions of justice. The main reason of pride of the EU is that namely EU complies to the International laws in the highest extent and promotes this uniform system around the world. Estonia is not just a souvereign independent state. Estonia is part of EU and in reward for compatibility to the EU standards this country becomes the financial aid and other privileges. For instance Turkey can not get the EU membership for this very reason, while being independent and souvereign democratic state.
Some time ago the authorities of Estonia replaced the memory plaque on the Bronze Soldier grave which contained the names of soldiers, with the plaque without names. In such way they became recently assert this grave was the grave of unknown soldiers who must be therefore excavated and defined, then - " be buried properly".
Where is conspiracy? It is open policy in Baltic states which Brussels condones all those years. Open their newspapers and read it especially before the elections. You don't give a damn for the human rights if those humans are Russians but we do. And we will, whether you like it or not.
Problem is not in the remains, problem is in the ultra-nationalists. They wanted those graves to be removed - and the government has done it, even with the price of great social explosion. You think this will cool up the ultra-mobs? No, they will only cheer up.
If so, and people are really devided on the subject, all the monuments must stand under the equal guard of law. What we see is the building one monuments and removing others. Clear ideologic biased agenda, quite different from democracy.

I must, wholeheartly, disagree on this one. Just the elimination of unsuited memebers of communities in order to establish communist rule speak against this idea. And from our experience, Soviets targeted civilians just to make expamples what would happen should someone object reds. Poland was overrun several times in WW2, they have little love for Soviets.

This is the first time I have heard of this kinds of events done by reds. Could you provide info about this? No, really, because I have read, over and over, that Soviets spared no ammo of their artillery as the were about to hit some place.

Good that Soviets buried their own in a land not their own, at least in some fronts.
But 12 soldiers is not a massive burial grounds compared to soldiers Soviets refused to acknowledge and left them to rot.
And Estonians did carefully excavate the burial mount and placed remains in a cemetary, something Soviets would have NEVER done. You should thank them in that act of humanity.

I have not heard about any EU nation destroying anything else but statues of Soviet era. Could you provide some background info about this?

Amm, at least here, search of fallen is regareded as a good deed, worthy of respect and thanks. Both Russians and us do that.
If you feel so strongly, please; come to Raatte-road and take the 17 500 corpses of fallen Soviets. According to the Soviets, mere 200 Soviet soldiers fell there so that was the number taken back, rest were left to rot. Finns buried them there.

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En uneksi. I do not dream.

Fennica,
You cited the post adressed to other forum-member. Therefore I leave some utmost empty assertions without comments, neither will I spend my time and provide you with special multiple info about facts you "hear for the first time" or you "have read over and over". If you want some certain unbiased judgement about Krakov, Budapest and other war operations - just take the pre- and post-war fotos of those cities and take the numbers of casualties. Then take the city-operations data in other similar places and find their fotos comparing the "architectural changes" and casualties. The case of Dresden will help you to pin the extremum in that equation - the city which was "doomed" to be left in "Soviet zone" .
As for the graves in Finland, it's good that you know their quantity and burial places. Hundreds thousands of German and Soviet soldiers are still scattered across Russia in bogs and forests. Every year only thousands are being found. It's a titanic job, if to consider the work in archives.

I just wondered weather you had anything ready. Shame that you do not, I'll look it up, though. It would be a refreshing change to see Soviets doing something decent as they pushed towards Berlin.

Warsaw and the uprising also comes to mind. I'll study those though, don't worry.
Dresden was nothing more than a revenge, massacre of refugees and civilians.

Of course we know our fallen. They were taken by comrades, Lotta-women washed their bodies and bodies were delivered to home burial grounds. We can identify at least 85% of all our fallen.
Also sometimes Soviet corpes were counted as they were buried.

Why I brought this up?
Because I find the dozens buried there and hundred here in European threatres become meaningless when Soviets disregared divisions of fallen elsewhere.

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En uneksi. I do not dream.

Soviet elites disregarded even alive brave soldiers who were encircled in 1941 and taken prisoner by Germans. Those elites exist no more or vanishing, for the first time we have Russian authorities in Kremlin, many things will change and come back to sense. The day will come and the last soldier will be found and determined. These days we must care for the alive first.