A German believed to have been the country’s last World War I veteran has died at the age of 107, a death that almost went unnoticed in a nation that lost both world wars and doesn’t track its remaining veterans.

Erich Kaestner, who was sent to the Western Front to fight in France, died Jan. 1 in a nursing home in Cologne, his son said Friday.

When France’s second-last surviving veteran from World War I, Louis de Cazenave, died Jan. 20, the news made international headlines.

But in Germany – which has had to cope with the shame of the Nazi genocide for more than six decades – there is not even an organization keeping track of the remaining veterans.

“That is the way history has developed,” Kaestner’s son, Peter Kaestner, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “In Germany, in this respect, these things are kept quiet – they’re not a big deal.”

The news did not even trickle out into the German press until this week, and the stories were more about how Germans remember than about Kaestner’s death itself.