Victims of Germanwings crash in French Alps commemorated, 10 years on

Relatives of the 150 people killed in a Germanwings airplane crash in the French Alps marked the 10th anniversary of the tragedy on Monday.
Germanwings Flight 9525 was en route from Barcelona to the western German city of Dusseldorf on March 24, 2015, when it crashed near the commune of Le Vernet, killing all on board.
Investigators believe the co-pilot, who suffered from a mental disorder, deliberately crashed the plane to take his own life.
Among the victims were a group of school students from the town of Haltern am See, located in the western Ruhr region, Germany's former industrial heartland.
Students and teachers at the Joseph König secondary school laid down white roses on Monday to commemorate the 16 students and two teachers killed in the crash.
A moment of silence was held in Haltern at 10:41 am (0941 GMT) to mark the exact time of the crash 10 years ago.
Pastoral counsellor Stephanie Rüsweg said the tragedy serves as a reminder that "the time we are given is a gift."
"Tell your loved ones today that you love them," she told students gathered at the school. "This is how life triumphs over death. This is how love triumphs over death."
Haltern Mayor Andreas Stegemann added: "We will not forget you."
In a post on X, the premier of the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia - where Haltern is located - said Germany is "united in remembering those who lost their lives 10 years ago."
"We will honour their memory," wrote Hendrik Wüst.
Many relatives have also travelled to the site of the tragedy in France to attend a memorial to commemorate the victims.
A 5-metre-high memorial, known as the Solar Orb, was installed at the site in 2017, made up of 149 panels - one for each of the victims, excluding the co-pilot.

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3 days ago

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Funeral celebrates life of much-loved D-Day veteran

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3 days ago

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Rosebushes at the gates of hell

Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up My grandfather had a camera, and he took photographs at Dachau. They ended up in his wartime scrapbook along with photos of Camp Old Gold, the Rhine, dusty German roads, bomber planes in the sky, and the Austrian Alps. I saw the scrapbook for the first time in 2015, when my grandmother brought it out at my grandfather's funeral. I knew my grandfather had been at Dachau. He had even shown me some of his war 'souvenirs,' as he called them, from Berchtesgaden. I had heard about the scrapbook over the years from my aunts and uncles, who mentioned it in low tones when the subject of my grandfather's wartime experience came up. But it had mostly remained stowed away in the dark, out of sight and out of mind. The author's grandfather's wartime scrapbook. Clark Family Collection As I turned its brittle pages, I understood why. There were black-and-white photographs of cattle cars on a railroad track with their doors half-open — death trains from Buchenwald, full of corpses. Hills of bodies outside the gas chamber and crematorium. Bodies on long flat carts, pulled by horses. Dead German soldiers on the ground. An enormous pile of clothes and striped uniforms. American GIs standing around, stunned. I knew what I was looking at, but my grandfather didn't. Not then. Like many American soldiers who witnessed horrors in Nazi Germany, my grandfather wanted to forget. He had helped liberate the Nazis' victims and should have been proud of the small role he played fighting fascism. But he never mentioned Dachau to me, even though he loved talking about history and politics. Somehow, I knew not to bring it up. He finally allowed my aunt to interview him about the war in 2011, when he was in his late 80s. He spoke dispassionately about what he had seen at Dachau and didn't give many details. 'We went around the back of it. And that's when it was bad, you know,' he said. My aunt attempted to draw him out, but his answers were vague. 'You change a little bit,' was all he said about his emotions then, and after. But I'd heard the story about how he once approached a couple of truck drivers who were talking about how the Holocaust had never happened. My grandfather told them to read their history, because he was there. He had seen it with his own eyes. The author's great-aunt Ann Clark, who made the scrapbook, with the author's grandfather Herbert J. Clark in front of their home on Columbus Ave. in Somerville during his second furlough from the war in 1944. Clark Family Collection In the summer of 2023, I traveled to Germany to research my novel, partially based on my grandfather's experience in Bavaria during the spring of 1945. I tried to retrace his wartime route. I went to Berchtesgaden and took Hitler's gaudy gilded elevator up to the Kehlsteinhaus — the 'Eagle's Nest,' an old Nazi chalet perched on the edge of a small mountain, with stunning views of the Alps. Now, improbably, the Eagle's Nest was a busy restaurant full of tourists and hikers who sat in the June sun with steins of golden beer. Apart from the historical photos that hung on some walls, it was hard to imagine Hitler relaxing there with the Nazi top brass. My grandfather had been here at the end of the war, he said, and had taken a swastika flag. American GIs had carved their names into the marble fireplace. I looked for his name but couldn't find it. The next day I walked through Dachau's museum, reconstructed barracks, gas chamber, and crematorium. I stood where I thought my grandfather had stood 78 years before, when he had taken his photographs. I still didn't know how to think about those photos. I worried, in my worst moments, that they were some kind of macabre war souvenir, like the flag he'd taken from Berchtesgaden. But in the crematorium at Dachau, I saw a photograph of local Germans forced by American soldiers to view the murdered victims' corpses. I thought I understood, then, why my grandfather had taken the photos. They were documentary evidence that this had really happened. Later, I learned that my grandfather had developed those photographs in Germany and sent them back home to Somerville, to get the word out about the horror he had witnessed at Dachau. 'You can't tell me the Germans didn't know,' he said in his interview with my aunt, referring to the townspeople of Dachau. 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I was wary about claiming any kind of trauma on his behalf — this was a man who would not even watch 'Saving Private Ryan' because he was uncomfortable with its themes of heroism. And yet, as I researched the stories of other GIs in the Blackhawk Division, I came to feel that what these young men went through at Dachau was its own kind of hell, one that many of them never forgot. The author's grandfather before his deployment during training at Camp Cook in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Clark Family Collection My family is not Jewish, but the Holocaust shadowed my grandfather's life. Dachau poisoned and twisted everything it touched, including the lives of those German townspeople looking away in the Dachau museum's photos — a larger metaphor for Germany in the immediate postwar years. As popular support for Germany's far right-wing AfD party and other fascist threats around the world grow, so does the need to revisit the lessons of Dachau. Soon, the last of World War II's survivors and veterans will be gone. But the photographs, diaries, letters, and scrapbooks will remain. As memories of the war fade, and as we face a growing and pernicious skepticism about the ravages of the Holocaust, I am grateful my grandfather took those photos. I think I now understand why he took them, and what they truly cost. He exposed a horror too much for words.