Two amateur archeologists have discovered the "Tunnel of Death" near Reims, where the remains of at least 270 German soldiers have been entombed since 1917 after a French artillery barrage.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56370510

The motives of the two amateur archeologists, while perhaps laudable, also raises several moral and ethical questions. Should the soldiers be left where they are in peace, or now that their location has been discovered, brought back up and identified before looters and souvenir hunters ransack the site?

Good story and several interesting pics, as well.

Great find Buckeye!

Its a shame that no one really would like to take care of the remains. Especially not Germany. Not it is only a forgotten war, nowadays there are also forgotten souls.
I hope they will rest in peace someday.

Thanks for sharing.

So sad... as the man said, a valuable find and the honorable thing would be to identify them and bury them properly. And by "valuable", I don't mean money-wise, but the incalcuable value of realizing the humanity of these men, as the writer said, of seeing them as fellow men who just wanted to be able to go home and live in peace.

I saw this same article, thanks for posting Buckeye.

It reminds me of the similar situation at Fromelles, where it was a Greek Australian amateur historian who found the mass burial site for 100's of Australian and British soldiers following the battle of Fromelles in 1916. In that circumstance, the Australian and British governments stepped in with the CWGC and exhumed them, identified them where they could and buried them individually in a brand new CWGC cemetery.

I sincerely hope that the German and French governments bang their heads together and sort this out before the place is ransacked by looters. They deserve better than that. That's someone's relative down there.

Sadly this is the first i have seen of this event.

So sad, so depressing. I think the regimental history of "a comrade asking someone to load his pistol for him" sums up the whole situation now.

The german government is all about recreating german history along very specific political theology, and dealing with the men inside the tunnel would be very detrimental to what they are trying to recreate.

to the french its just another day of finding something from world war one.