THE MYSTERY OF THE FOREST SWASTIKAS

 



Someone has been painting Germany with swastikas, but who may have done it could remain a mystery.

The way the wily nazi supporters are getting away with their message of hate, is by creating swastikas out of trees, and doing so in times whose date is uncertain.  One thing is for sure: larch forests are painted in yellow crosses.  

The first one was discovered in 1992.  At that time, aerial photography was under way for irrigation lines.  

The photographer found a group of 140 larches in the middle of a very dense forest. The larches, unlike the pines that surround them, are not evergreens.  In the fall, their leaves turn and color the swastikas in the green of the forest.  

The aerial view was of Kutzerower Heath at Zernikow.  The design of the swastia covered an area that was 200 foot by 200 foot.  It was not meant to be subtle.  

The local forester, Klaus Goericke went to find information of what or who could be responsible for the hateful formation.  After he calculated the trees' age and rate of growth, he realized that the swastika had been made during the 1930s and not recently by some extremist right wing fanatic.  

The interesting  thing was that no one had noticed it for so long.  Because of the short time of the leaf coloring in the fall, it had passed unnoticed.  Planes that passed by, not on photography mission, but for civilian traffic, were too high and too far to the east to notice it.  Private planes on the other hand had been forbidden in East Germany, so that for decades, no one had flown over it. 

The newspaper the Berliner, however, finally figured out that it had been planted in gratitude to the Third Reich Labor Service for building a street in Zernikow. 

So offensive was the swastika that Francois Mitterand, the French premier called his German counterpart to hack it down.  In 1995, forestry workers cut down 40 trees, thereby modifying the cross enough to remove the insult without killing all trees in the formation.  However, whether innocently or not, the forestry workers had been wrong in thinking the symbol had been modified.  In 2000, the bright yellow pattern was boldly protruding from the forest once again.  The edges seemed to fade away, but the gist of it, and the main design, remained as unequivocal as ever. 

German authorities then worried the place could become a neonazi shrine and in December 2000 the cross was clipped again, more carefully this time, to ensure the design would not resurface again.  

This apparently was not the only such swastika in Germany.  Another one was found in nothern Hesse in the 1980s.  In 2000 another one was found in a fir forest in Wiesbaden.  Moreover, more and more reports surfaced of many, many more forests swastikas in the forests all over Germany. 

More curiously, one was found in Kyrgyzstan, where apparently a German exile had planned the planting of a tree swastika in the village of Tash-Bashat.  The swastika measures 600 feet across.  Some believe the design was a token of German-Russian friendship when Hitler and Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non aggression pact.  

Source: Der Spiegel online/ 7.5.13

 

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