Danube at record low reveals two 1944 soldiers and their motorcycle

The Danube returns two German soldiers from 1944 and their motorcycle

The Danube crisis has, at least, one archive to bring to the surface. The historic drop in the river's level in Budapest has revealed the remains of two German soldiers who went missing in 1944, along with a military motorcycle and the identification tags, still intact, that should have been enough to identify them more than eight decades ago.

A find with archaeological and family value

The discovery serves two purposes. The first is archaeological: a snapshot of World War II preserved in the riverbed, which specialists are now documenting before removing it. The second is human: the identification tags will make it possible to put names to the two soldiers and, perhaps, inform families who have spent eight decades without answers. The question is whether any heirs still remember those young men: at this point, it is not certain that anyone remembers great-grandfathers recruited as almost teenagers.

The German motorcycle that survived the plunge

Where some see history, others see engineering. The military motorcycle has prompted the inevitable joke: with a new battery, it would start. It is a joke, but it points to something real: the quality of German manufacturing in the 1940s, able to survive eight decades underwater while looking ready to ride.

Soldiers who could have been 99 years old

There is one detail that humanizes the story: if they were 18 in 1945, as was likely among recruits in the final months of the war, they were born in 1927 and would be 99 today. It is entirely possible they could still be alive. The imagination places a shell a few meters away: two nonagenarians having a beer in a courtyard, telling how they escaped Budapest with the motorcycle. It did not happen that way.

The Danube has acted as both archive and gravedigger. Now it is time to exhume, identify and return the names. What nobody fully explains is why a river has to dry up for the war of 1944 to have something left to tell us.