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Secrets and Lies Shroud Origins of Giant Swastika

A window in Tash-Bashat looking out on a mountainside emblazoned with a 600-foot wide, fir-tree swastika. Who planted the trees this way and why is a mystery obscured by legend, politics and conflicting memories.Credit...Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

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.

Yedil Musayev, a teacher, said the trees were planted in the 1940’s by Kyrgyz laborers from the sprawling Lenin Collective Farm, which managed the region’s high plateau. The farm’s managers consisted of Russians and Europeans, he said, sent to distant posts to battle illiteracy and improve efficiency.

Unbeknownst to the Kyrgyz laborers, he said, their forestry supervisor was an ethnic German who had been exiled to the east, as were many Germans during the war. He was a Nazi sympathizer, Mr. Musayev said. The forest was his design.

Sultanbek Kandibayev, director of the regional forestry service, gave a different version, saying the trees were planted in 1953, after Stalin’s death, under the supervision of a woman who was a German nationalist.

Ulambek Sheripov, a deputy director, added detail, saying the woman hid her plans by having the slope planted a patch at a time. But he disagreed with his director about when the plantings occurred, saying a survey in 1991 estimated the trees were 50 years old at the time, meaning they were most likely planted before 1953.

Bekbosun Uskumbayev, another forestry official, said the truth has been hard to establish because the service’s archives are in disarray. (A check with the archives found records back only to 1960.)

Moreover, fresh myths and mistakes continue to confuse the tale.

Mr. Uskumbayev recalled an article in the late 1990’s in Vecherniy Bishkek, a Kyrgyz newspaper. The story said a man called “the professor” planted the trees in the 1960’s and then disappeared with a forester — a fate suggesting they had been arrested by the K.G.B.

The article was accompanied by a clearly doctored photograph, showing a lower arm on the formation that does not exist. “Their version was not true,” Mr. Uskumbayev said, sighing.

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An arboreal enigma above the Kyrgyz village of Tash-Bashat.Credit...The New York Times

Into this confused history, Vladimir Yashchuk, a local guide, offered yet another account. He said when he was schoolboy his teachers told him the trees were planted in the late 1930’s, as Stalin and Hitler were approving the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact.

“It was the friendship of peoples at that time,” he said. “Stalin made this deal with Germany, and this swastika was planted in the framework of that agreement.”

Or so said the lessons in Soviet schoolhouses, Mr. Yashchuk added. No one is really sure. “Every guide has his own variation,” he said.

The mystery’s persistence is in its way surprising, given that as a Nazi swastika the symbol is imperfect, whether by design or because of uneven terrain. Hitler’s swastika was tilted 45 degrees; the formation here is almost level. Moreover, the arms do not mimic the Third Reich’s symbol, but its mirror image — a swastika in reverse.

No matter the flaws, the trees of Tash-Bashat long ago drew the interest of the People’s Council of Germans in Kyrgyzia, a private organization in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital. As part of a hunt for missing Germans and their graves, the council researched whether prison gangs planted the formation, said Valery Dill, the council’s chairman.

It was a frustrating search. “The Soviet power did everything to hide all of the evidence, all of the truth,” he said.

Eventually the S.N.B., the Kyrgyz successor to the K.G.B., told the council that German prisoners worked from two camps: one near Bishkek, another near the southern city of Osh. Further searches led Mr. Dill to episodes of brutality and callousness.

He found an elderly former P.O.W. near Osh, he said, who was one of more than 100 Germans who had been forced to dig in uranium mines at Maili-Suu. One day a rumor circulated that Stalin would allow German prisoners who had not married in the Soviet Union to be repatriated, Mr. Dill said the man had told him.

Soon after, the K.G.B. brought lines of Kyrgyz women to the mine, he said, and told the Germans to choose a bride or be shot.

As he dug deeper for the Germans’ fate and the origins of the trees, Mr. Dill said, his research suggested that a prisoners with a background in hydrology was sent to Tash-Bashat, then known as Kalinin.

He was ordered to direct plantings to protect the basin’s watershed. The hydrologist likely supervised the formation’s planting, Mr. Dill said. He added a caveat. “It is hard to know whether it is a legend or not,” he said.

On one point almost all in the valley agree: No prison gangs worked here. Four elders in the village said only Kyrgyz planters labored on these hills. Three of them, including Baken Kizekbayev, 69, and Asambek Sulambekov, 71, said they planted the trees themselves. Their supervisor, they recalled, was a white, female forester.

“My mother worked for the forester and I helped her,” Mr. Sulambekov said. “They gave us a plan: how many hectares had to be prepared, planted and so forth. One year we prepared it. The next year we planted it. Then the forest grew.”

Mr. Sulambekov said he joined the army and returned years later. The swastika surprised him when it emerged, he said. As for the tales of prisoner work gangs, he said: “It never happened. There were no German prisoners or even Russian prisoners. Only locals.”

Mr. Sulambekov and Mr. Kizekbayev could not remember exactly when they helped plant the trees, but agreed it was in the 1940’s or 1950’s.

More than a half century later, they represented the split over the formation’s significance. Mr. Sulambekov said it is a curiosity. Mr. Kizekbayev said it is an offense. “I do not like it, this fascist sign,” he said. “It should be cut down.”

Then he flashed a mischievous smile. Whoever designed this may have taken a dangerous risk. “You do not think I am guilty, do you?” he asked, eyes twinkling. “Will they take me to a prison?”

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