German War Graves

8.30pm and I'm just slipping into relaxation mode after a long and busy day. I was out on the road at 8am and have been driving from place to place all day publicising the jobs initiative programme which is the work I am now engaged in. Met so many really nice people during the day, all leaders in their own communities. Another day of the same tomorrow.
First call of the day was to the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. I wont go into the history of that particular project because just around the corner from there, high in the Wicklow Mountains is the German War Memorial. Ireland was of course neutral during World War2 although of course the same cannot be said of WWI, at which time we were part of the British Empire. It was a strange sort of neutrality which meant that all German sailors and airmen who were washed up on our shores or descended from burning aeroplanes were locked up and not allowed home until hostilities had ceased. Technically the same applied to all allied military as well. Any of them who escaped from the camp could try to make it to the British occupied North from where they would of course re-enter the war. Not an awful lot of effort was made to stop them. It was a malleable neutrality.
Many German sailors and airmen were not lucky enough to be locked up and kept safe from the war. Ships were lost at sea and stricken planes came crashing out of the sky and in each and every case the German dead were interred in this burial ground at Glencree which has become a place of reverence and memorial for the German dead of both world wars.