Germany to end search for World War II missing

Germany’s Red Cross says it will end its search for missing persons from World War II in 2023, 78 years after the end of the devastating war, leaving the fate of 1.2 million people a mystery.

“We won’t be able to shed light on their fates,” the head of the German Red Cross’s tracing service, Thomas Huber, tells the DPA news agency.

Shelves with boxes of index cards keeping a record of German soldiers who died or went missing in war, in an archive room at the German Red Cross Tracing Service offices in Munich, January 24, 2013. (AFP PHOTO / dpa / Victoria BONN-MEUSER)

While interest has waned over the decades, the German Red Cross says it still received some 9,000 requests in 2016 from people looking for information about family members who vanished during the war.

Researchers were able to find answers in 40 percent of those cases after scouring archives from the Second World War and those left behind by the Soviets and authorities in communist East Germany.

— AFP