German WWII soldiers buried in new Cheb cemetary

A German association started burying the remains of 5,500 German soldiers and civilians killed during World War II in Cheb on Wednesday. The remains have all been discovered over the last ten years. A spokesperson for the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgraberfursorge said that the first 330 soldiers would be buried on Wednesday. The rest would follow over the next two or three weeks, he added. The graveyard in Cheb is still largely unfinished and is expected to be inaugurated in 2010. The Czech Republic was one of the last battlegrounds in World War II, with Prague the last major city to be liberated. Liberation brought reprisals against German soldiers and to many of the estimated three million German-speaking civilians who had lived in the former Czechoslovakia.