Schröder's Private Pilgrimage

It seems as if German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has spent the entire summer publicly apologizing for World War II. He was the first German leader to participate in D-day ceremonies on the 60th anniversary of the Allied invasion in June. Last week, he became the first German Chancellor to honor the estimated 200,000 Poles killed by German troops during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. And this week, the Chancellor makes another war-related pilgrimage, this time to Romania. Sixty years ago, his father, Fritz, a lance corporal in the Wehrmacht, was killed and buried with eight other German soldiers in a communal grave in the tiny village of Ceanu Mare, in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains. Gerhard, his only son, is scheduled to visit the grave on Thursday.

Until four years ago, Schröder didn't even know the grave existed. His older sister, Gunhild, found the site's location through state records. Fritz Schröder was a 27-year-old manual laborer when he married Gerhard's mother, Erika, in October 1939 in the city of Detmold, North Rhine-Westphalia. Weeks later he was conscripted, becoming a tank engineer on the Russian front. Gunhild was born the next year, and on hearing of the birth of his son in April 1944, he wrote to his wife: "I am glad for you that this time it's a boy. In the autumn, I am coming home."

Fritz Schröder never came home, and never met his newborn son. On Oct. 4, 1944, two months after Romania declared war on Germany, he was killed, reportedly by a Katyusha rocket, while fighting in a bunker just south of Ceanu Mare.

Anica Cuc, 88, was 28 at the time. Taking a break in her garden from some afternoon weeding last week, she recalled an ox-drawn wooden cart pulling up outside the village church after the battle, where it deposited "eight or nine" bodies that were buried by German soldiers. "It was good that the Germans were buried near the church," she says. "They were human souls, not enemies, at least not to me." That remarkable sympathy seems to have lasted; the German flag flies alongside the Romanian colors at the church gate.

Schröder is said to revere his father, and to have been struck by a black-and-white wartime photograph of his dad in a steel helmet that reveals their physical similarities: the same square jaw, steely eyes and prominent nose. And after his own experience sending troops into action during the Kosovo war, the first time since World War II that German soldiers were sent abroad, Schröder felt a new bond with his father, according to his biographer, Jürgen Hogrefe. Schröder "is more serious than he has ever been before," says Hogrefe. "He is ready to face reality and withstand heavy emotions."

Schröder's trip is one more small step in his country's effort to account for its past, but his brief visit to Romania is ultimately a personal journey. "No matter how far away he is, a son wants to know where his father lies," says Anica Cuc.