The distinction is explained at Bloomberg Business Week:
“In Latvia, it is normal for you to have dead soldiers on your yard,”
Esmits said. “When people came back to their homes after the war, they
saw there was a dead soldier here and a dead soldier there, and they
just buried them.”..
During the final months of World War II, Latvia was the site of
especially bloody battles between German and Soviet forces.
Approximately 350,000 Nazis were cut off here from the rest of the
German line in the autumn of 1944, in what became known as the Courland
Pocket. In the months that followed, about 100,000 of them were killed...
... in recent years, the often illicit market in Nazi memorabilia has
intensified, creating a new class of diggers across eastern Europe
that
is at odds with Esmits’s work. Of particular interest are relics... Some
$50 million in military memorabilia is sold each year, according to an
estimate by the Guardian, and Nazi items fetch a premium...
For the Volksbund, grave robbing remains a persistent problem,
especially in Russia and Ukraine. “Grave robbers blight our work,”
Kirchmeier says. Many illegal diggers dutifully give over information to
officials if they come across a dead body, he says, but others “open
graves and then take out anything they can sell—steel helmets, pieces of
equipment, medals, belt buckles, personal mementos belonging to the
dead, sometimes even the skull, leaving the rest of the bones on the
forest floor.”
Yngve Sjodin, a Norway-based militaria seller who sometimes digs with
Legenda, says he was confronted with a “black digger” during one of his
first digs for soldiers in Latvia, in 2014. “He screamed at us that it
was his forest,” he says, “and started attacking the guy next to me.” He
adds, “The driving force for the black diggers is money, which they
need to survive, or party, or whatever.”
Much more at Bloomberg.
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