how long will they be standing

[Nick]

Death/concentration camps and old battle sites


This was a question i thought about quite recently after watching a program, a motorway had to continue through an old battlefield from WW1 in Holland or France due to the amount of traffic on the roads etc

Anyway, how long do you think you can keep all the camps and battlefields etc untouched?

I guess there are a few different reasons now a days, economic, transport safety and local pressure to shift these memorials from over 60+ years ago and while we still have veterans today will the inclination still be here in another 60 years?

I suppose as long there is pressure kept on governments to keep them, then this should safe guard them.

any thoughts

I agree that for the most part pressure is the most likely way, as time goes on we should do more to protect these historic sites, but the opposite appears to be true.

[Kiwiwriter]

The camps will survive longer than the battlefields, because of their horrific history. Even the most callous developer will be reluctant to tear up a site where millions died in agony to build a new shopping mall or condos.

The battlefields, however, being big, sprawling, and having less blood shed per acre, are more at risk. Here in America, Disney nearly built a giant theme park on the site of the Manassas battlefield. Vast stretches of the Cold Harbor trenches have fallen to the bulldozer. I expect that most of the WW1 trenchline that is not a memorial will face a similar fate.

However, one barrier to construction on WW1 and WW2 battlefields is the obvious one: unexploded ordnance. They keep finding it every year, and it's just as lethal now as it was 60 or 90 years ago.

I recall when reading of Kitty Hart-Moxons return to Auschwitz how she went to the rear of the Crema 5 I think it was where this a smallish pond. Leaning over and rumaging about a bit she found fragments of human bone, an altogether different type of discovery 60 years on.