During battles at the end of World War II, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians never got a decent burial. For almost 30 years, one man has been finding these bodies and helping them rest in peace.

The first thing one sees is a jawbone. Erwin Kowalke picks it carefully up out of the loamy soil and sets it in a small, gray cardboard coffin sitting next to the freshly unearthed grave. Two probes of his spade later he pulls out a skull.

"This boy was about 20. Not much older," he says, pointing out the well-preserved teeth. "The wisdom teeth aren't quite in yet." In all likelihood, he's handling the remains of a Soviet soldier. The teeth are a clue. "Russians were differently nourished. That's why their teeth are ground down more than Germans," he explains.

When he finds a decomposed leather shoe a few minutes later, his suspicions are confirmed. "This is a Russian," Kowalke reports. The shoe has a knobby rubber sole. "And those belonged only to soldiers of the Red Army."

Kowalke is a specialist in his field. He started working for the German War Graves Association (VDK) in 1980 and ever since he has traveled to the last battlefields of the World Wars to do his job. He is actually retired these days but he continues to volunteer for the organization, which has located, identified and buried German soldiers since 1919. And Kowalke's expertise is in demand. After the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he spent months in the former Yugoslavia uncovering and identifying bodies.