We'll always be haunted by the images of war

HUGH NASH said it quite clearly: "WAR IS SYSTEMATIC mass murder, the ugliest manifestation of man's inhumanity to man. Elementary morality demands of us that we work tirelessly to abolish it. And morality aside, war cannot be defended on practical grounds. There can be no victor in World War III; there can only be losers."

On January 1 Erich Kaestner, a soldier believed to have been Germany's last World War I veteran, died in Cologne at the age of 107

When France's next-to-last surviving veteran from World War I, Louis de Cazenave, 110, died 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 genocide 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, said in a telephone interview. The news did not trickle out into the German media until this week, and the articles were more about how Germans remember than about Kaestner's death.

"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 Friday in its obituary of Kaestner