Say Anything Blog

TASH-BASHAT, Kyrgyzstan — The forest stands overhead in the dusty mountain air, a dense composition of fir trees on a slope, planted by labor gangs decades ago.

Its right angles are sharp and clear, forming a square cross with an upraised arm on one side and a turned-down arm on the other. Viewed from this remote village, the effect strongly suggests a living swastika, a huge and chilling symbol, out of place and time.

This is the so-called Eki Naryn swastika, a man-made arrangement of trees near the edge of the Himalayas. It is at least 60 years old, according to the region’s forestry service, and roughly 600 feet across.

Legend has it that German prisoners of war, pressed into forestry duty after World War II, duped their Soviet guards and planted rows of seedlings in the shape of the emblem Hitler had chosen as his own.

More than 20 years later, the trees rose tall enough to be visible from the village beneath. Only then did the swastika appear, a time-delayed act of defiance by vanquished soldiers marooned in a corner of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

For all the tidiness of legend, however, the tale is not quite true. The provenance of these trees presents a more complicated mystery than a silent subterfuge in a forgotten prison camp. The theory about the prisoners has survived for years, in part because about 1.3 million German soldiers have been missing in the former Soviet Union since the war, according to the German Red Cross. Many were forced to work. They mined uranium and coal, toiled on farms, erected buildings and built roads, railways and canals.

As many as 30,000 of them were sent to Central Asia, the German Red Cross says. The symmetry in the tree line, evidence of their defiance, by this telling, may be the Third Reich’s only practical joke.

But aside from the presence of the tree formation itself, unraveling the origins of the lost Nazis’ presumed insubordination is a chore undercut by time. History has become malleable, a yarn by turns sinister, wry, clever and Soviet. It is also warped by errors, a cover-up, competing theories and lies.