Last week Soldier's Home took a look at the passing of Louis de Cazenave, one of France's two remaining WWI veterans.  Since then we've heard news of two more veterans dying as the final representatives from a fading era.

Erich Kaestner, said to be Germany's last surviving WWI veteran, is making headlines not so much for his death but for the amount of time it took to realize his significance. He died on January 1 at the age of 107, but it was not until recently that word got out he was Germany's last living link to the Great War.  As the BBC reports:

Reports in Die Welt daily and Der Spiegel magazine identified Kaestner as Germany's last World War I veteran, but verification of the claim was difficult as the country keeps no record of its war veterans.

In a country where the shame of the Nazi genocide and memories of two world war defeats still cast long shadows, both publications focused more on the German national psyche than the death itself.

"The German public was within a hair's breadth of never learning of the end of an era," wrote Der Spiegel, until someone updated his death notice on the internet encyclopaedia site, Wikipedia.

In its obituary for Kaestner, Die Welt noted: "The losers hide themselves in a state of self-pity and self denial that they happily try to mitigate by forgetting." 

"Any form of commemoration of military events is seen as problematic here," Chiari told Spiegel Online.

"Our veterans only take part in public ceremonies when they are invited abroad to join commemorative events with veterans from other countries. World War I is seen as part of a historical line that led to World War II. You can't equate the two but there is much debate about it."