The only German soldier to have a WW2 memorial in Europe.

 

An unwanted child in the former East Germany, Karl-Heinz Rosch lived with his grandparents after his parents’ marriage dissolved early on. He wanted to become a forester, but the war had other plans for him. Shortly after his high school graduation in 1944, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht Armed Forces. As a gunner, he formed part of the Fallschirmjäger Paratrooper Artillery.
While the German army occupied The Netherlands, Rosch was billeted with five others at the Kilsdonk family’s farm in Goirle. The family and Karl-Heinz got along fine. He warned them of visits by high-ranking German officers so they could hide their radio and bicycles.

On October 6, 1944, three days after Rosch turned 18, he and his platoon came under artillery fire from British forces. He was about to hide in the basement along with his comrades. But he noticed that the farmer’s two children, Toos and Jantje, seemed unaware of the danger around them, continuing to play in the yard.
He ran to the children, picked them both up, and brought them to the safety of the basement and their mother’s arms. He ran back outside to position himself on the other side of the farmyard when a mortar shell hit him exactly where the children had been playing. “His corpse was completely torn apart, there were body parts everywhere,” according to someone who witnessed the scene. He was buried in a temporary grave in the farmyard. Shreds from his clothing hung high in the branches of a tree for years.
In 1942, as a warning to resistance fighters, the Germans tied five men from Goirle to stakes and executed them for sabotaging a railroad track in Rotterdam. Memories of this action as well as of the German occupation pained local residents for years so the story of Rosch’s heroism was kept quiet. Even Rosch’s parents and grandparents did not know how he died. It was not until the grown Kilsdonk children gave their testimonies that the story of the young German soldier’s sacrifice went public.
According to Herman van Rouwendaal, a former city councilor of Goirle, Rosch’s story was ignored for 60 years, “Because he was just a damn Kraut.”  Nonetheless, in 2008, the then 76-year-old Rouwendaal, along with his friends, began efforts to commemorate Rosch’s kind act.
Supporters of a statue in Rosch’s honor met opposition. Some people argued that it was not right to build a statue for an enemy soldier when the five local men killed by the Germans had no memorial honoring their deaths.
After much discussion, the city council turned down the statue of Rosch. Not only was state funding for the statue refused, but also the city council refused to have the monument displayed in any public area—a resolution regarded wrong by many Dutch citizens.
This did not deter the monument’s supporters, however, who raised private funds for the statue. “We will not be honoring the Wehrmacht, but rather the humanity of a young German soldier,” van Rouwendaal pointed out during the drive for the memorial.
Artist Riet van der Louw depicted Karl-Heinz Rosch as he was—a Wehrmacht soldier with a child tucked under each arm being carried to safety. The statue now stands in a front garden privately owned by a resident of Goirle who knew Rosch when he was still alive. The small statue is the only WWII memorial to honor a German soldier in Europe.