STORY: Moving ceremony on Friday morning at the Bundeswehr Operations Command in Schwielowsee. A new memorial is dedicated in the so-called “Forest of Remembrance” – it is the memorial grove from Camp Marmal in Afghanistan, which was rebuilt on the site near Potsdam. The memorial commemorates the people from eleven nations who lost their lives in action in Afghanistan, including 59 soldiers from the Bundeswehr. One of them was Konstantin Menz. His mother Tanja said she wished she could visit the Ehrenhain with her family in Germany. “And very important: For me, this is the place where the soldiers who were deployed together, died there together, are reunited here. Here they are together again and no longer alone.” With a view to public discussions, Menz said that the sentence: “The Afghanistan mission was completely pointless” made her thoughtful and sad. “It made me sad because I would have liked people’s lives there to be safer and better in the long term. And it made me think because I hope that political mistakes made there will not be repeated in the future. And I was annoyed by the statement. We all learned a lot from the Afghanistan mission. We had to learn that there are young people who come out of the missions surprised in body or soul and who sometimes find it very difficult to get back here. We had to learn that there are veterans, those who died in action and those left behind again. Federal Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht also praised the grove of honor as a place where it becomes visible what the profession of a soldier can ultimately mean. “Here we commemorate those who work for security Germany’s have given everything, even their own lives. Every single name, whether on the steles or on the trees, clearly shows us. It’s children, parents, grandparents and friends who wear our uniform.” Back then, it was the soldiers themselves who suggested building the memorial in 2007. Before the camp near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif was abandoned in 2021, the emergency services on site also loaded the memorial stone, which weighed several tons, and the plaques with the names of the dead and flew them back to Germany. Now the memorial in the Forest of Remembrance is open to all people who want to commemorate the dead. All soldiers who died are remembered have fallen or died in an accident.More than a hundred emergency personnel have died on the Bundeswehr’s foreign missions alone.