Tail fin is turned into a shrine for dead children

The families arrived on a Tupolev jet – just like the one in which their loved ones died – and brought flowers for their dead children.

Batyr Khismatullin had dug up the flowers his 15-year-old daughter, Lenara, once planted at home in the Urals, and brought them 3,000 miles, wrapped in newspaper, to plant in the corner of Germany where she died.

They all came to remember, amid the blowing corn, with views across the rolling hills to the shining waters of Lake Constance and the blue hills of Switzerland beyond. Their children died in the sky above this spot, when the Tupolev jet was ripped apart like tissue paper in a collision with a DHL cargo plane in mid-flight.

On Monday night, the flaming wreckage of the plane rained down on the spot where they stood. Yesterday, having attended a memorial service, the 140 mourners were taken to the scene for an hour. They gathered round the severed tail fin of the Tupolev, which lay on its side in the middle of a field it as if it were a shrine. They decorated it with flowers and stood and held each other and wept.

Six doctors, including physicians and psychiatrists and 30 grief counsellors were on hand.

The families could not see the bodies. So desecrated are the remains – by the fire that made the sky burn over Überlingen and by the 35,000ft fall – the regional interior minister for Baden-Wuerttemberg said psychologists had advised the authorities to refuse requests by parents to view the remains.

"Many of the relatives, especially those who were parents of the children on board, are very distraught," Thomas Schaeuble said. "Physically, some of them could almost not bear it."

Harald Wanner, a police spokesman, said: "It would be dreadful to show relatives the wrong child." He said the families had been asked to bring worn clothing, sheets and combs from which DNA genetic material could be retrieved to aid identification. "Many of the victims no longer have their faces," he said.

So the mourners were asked to bring mementoes of the dead with them – their children's photographs, dental records, used hairbrushes, sheets and worn clothes, to help the identification. They brought the last traces of their children with them, even if only a few strands of hair left behind in a comb.

And they dug at the earth for memories of their loved ones. Some scooped up handfuls of dirt, others picked at the leaves of maize. Some black-clad mourners carried red and white carnations, traditional at Russian funerals, as they departed.

And, for 20 miles around, forensic scientists were still scouring the fields and woods for the bodies. Just metres from where the mourners stood, a huge section of fuselage had fallen in one piece. It was said the police found the bodies of some of the passengers still strapped into their seats there.

Nearby in the other direction,the body of one of the pilots fell through the roof of a stable at a home for mentally disabled children, according to the husband of a cleaner at the home. But not all the victims who fell from the sky were in one piece.

Miles from where the mourners stood by the tail, the children at the exclusive Salem International College said they were told by police not to walk down a particular country path, because body parts could be lying on it.

The sad fact of this grim, grim task is the search will go on a long time and the German police say they fear they may never find all the dead.