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Last German World War I veteran passes on in silence

It was an American, General Douglas MacArthur, who famously reflected that "old soldiers never die; they just fade away."

But the phrase seems to apply better to the quiet passing of a German believed to have been the country's last World War I veteran.

Erich Kaestner died on Jan. 1 quietly in a nursing home in Cologne at the age of 107, his son said.

When France's second-last surviving veteran from World War I, Louis de Cazenave, died on Jan. 20, the news made international headlines.

But in Germany -- which lost both world wars and has had to cope with the shame of the Nazi atrocities for more than six decades -- there is not even an organization keeping track of the remaining veterans.

"That is the way history has developed," Kaestner's son, Peter Kaestner, said in a telephone interview. "In Germany, in this respect, these things are kept quiet -- they're not a big deal."

The news did not even trickle out into the German press until this week and the stories were more about how Germans remember than Kaestner's death itself.

"The losers hide themselves in a state of self-pity and self-denial that they happily try to mitigate by forgetting," the daily Die Welt wrote on Friday in its obituary for Kaestner.

Der Spiegel magazine said that "the German public was within a hair's breadth of never learning of the end of an era" until someone who had read Kaestner's death notice in a newspaper figured out who he was and updated a Wikipedia entry on the Internet.

Kaestner was born in 1900 and had just graduated from high school in 1918 when he entered the army, his son said.

Following training, he was sent to the Western Front to fight in France, but was never sent to the front lines.

"He was just a soldier for a quarter to a half a year," Peter Kaestner said.
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