Maleme German War Cemetery
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The German military cemetery Maleme is a military cemetery near the town of Maleme on the north coast of Crete . The cemetery, on which mainly German soldiers are buried, who died in the airborne battle for Crete ("Operation Merkur") in 1941, was established by the German War Graves Commission and inaugurated on October 6, 1974.
The cemetery is about 1 km south of the airport and town of Maleme as well as the old coastal road, about 18 kilometers west of Chania .
The fighting
Around a fifth of the German soldiers were killed in the attack on Crete in "Operation Merkur". There were also war crimes.
The dead
Memorial plaque I
Memorial plaque II
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4465 German Wehrmacht soldiers are buried in the cemetery. 3352 of them fell in the airborne battle of Crete at the end of May 1941. The fallen are mainly paratroopers and mountain fighters .
The general of the parachute troop Bruno Bräuer is the highest-ranking soldier lying in the cemetery. Bräuer was the German commander of the fortress of Crete. He was convicted and executed as a war criminal in Athens in 1947 .
Reburial
The reburial service of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge was able to recover German casualties from scattered field graves and provisional graves in Crete from April to November 1960 and transfer them to the Gonia monastery . The sarcophagi with the German dead remained in this place for several years until they could be embedded in the newly created German military cemetery in Maleme.
investment
The layout of the complex symbolizes the four main fighting areas of the battle for the places Chania, Maleme, Rethymnon and Heraklion . From the street, the visitor enters the courtyard, which is cut into the mountain and bordered on one side by the entrance building, via steps. Through its open space, in which the name books of the fallen are on display and in which a trilingual exhibition informs about the creation of the cemetery and the work of the Volksbund, the path leads up to the walled grave fields, where lying granite slabs with names and The life data of two fallen soldiers each mark the graves planted with midday flowers.
The names of 360 soldiers who fell on the island but could not be recovered are immortalized on metal plaques on the memorial square in the middle of the grave fields.
Numerous former comrades of the fallen took part in the expansion work. The 1st Airborne Division of the Bundeswehr took over the sponsorship for this cemetery in 1975 (until its dissolution in 1994).
See also
Web links
- Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. on Maleme Military Cemetery, accessed July 7, 2012
- Monument project , listing of the fallen
Individual evidence
- ↑ Memory of a cruel battle. Memory of the victims in Maleme / Greece. In: Frieden, October 2014, p. 33
Coordinates: 35 ° 31 ′ 20.6 ″ N , 23 ° 49 ′ 52.4 ″ E