In 2018, Russian workers laying pipe in Volgograd discovered a grave containing more than 1,800 German soldiers and their horses who died during the battle. This was far from the first such find. Searchers continue to locate several hundred bodies at the massive battle site each summer. They sometimes use metal detectors to try to find items like cutlery that might have the soldiers’ names scratched on them. The hope is that this could aid in identifying the dead.
“There are still a lot of relatives who have hope to find their relative, to know anything [about] where they died or how they died,” Mikhail Shuvarikov, a volunteer searcher, said in 2018. Following excavations and possible identification, many of the remains end up at the nearby Rossoshka Military Cemetery. There, both German and Russian war dead lay on the same hallowed ground where they once fought each other more than 80 years ago.
