Oderbrück Memorial Cemetery

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EF Oderbrueck 2018.JPG

The Ehrenfriedhof Oderbrück is a military cemetery on the B4 between Braunlage and Bad Harzburg in the immediate vicinity of the Brocken in the Upper Harz . It is the highest war cemetery in Lower Saxony .

location

Main path with stone cross

The cemetery is located about one kilometer north of Oderbrück at an altitude of about 850 m on a well-traveled hiking trail that leads over the triangular pile to the Brocken. The burial site is about 200 m west of the B4 in a forest clearing. To the right of the entrance is a memorial stone with a plaque and the inscription:

"Here lie 99 German soldiers who died in the fighting in the Harz Mountains in April 1945 and 14 Russian soldiers who died as prisoners of war in transports."

You enter the cemetery of honor through a waist-high iron gate, on the right stone post of which the years 1939 and 1945 are written. A path made of rough stone slabs leads through the rows of graves to a high stone cross on which these dates - the duration of the Second World War - can also be seen. A metal plate in front of the cross bears the inscription: "The dead in the east".

tomb

Memorial stone at the entrance

The cemetery was set up in July 1946 by employees of the Sankt Andreasberg Forestry Office with the help of a local funeral home. The cemetery was inaugurated on September 28 of the same year. Initially there were 113 graves on the site, some of which were opened in the summer of 1965 as a result of the initiative of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge in order to identify the buried. After successful identification, some of the fallen were reburied at the request of their relatives. For this reason, the actual number of graves differs from the information on the memorial stone at the entrance.

Members of the Wehrmacht , the Hitler Youth , the Volkssturm and the Waffen SS are buried in 90 graves at the Oderbrück cemetery. There are also 14 graves for unknown Soviet prisoners of war who came from a nearby camp or were killed on a so-called evacuation march from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp . In memory of the victims, an annual memorial hour is held in the cemetery of honor, which is organized by the local reservist association.

As part of a school project, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge had an information board erected on the west side of the site. Various organizations and authorities have so far been involved in looking after the war cemetery, including the Braunlage youth red cross, the Sankt Andreasberg and Clausthal-Zellerfeld forestry offices , the Achtermannshöhe forestry, the Goslar air base and the Brunnenbachsmühle youth forest home in the Harz National Park .

Individual evidence

  1. a b Entry on the website of the Volksbund für Kriegsgräberfürsorge, accessed on December 28, 2018
  2. a b Information board of the Volksbund für Kriegsgräberfürsorge eV on the west side of the site
  3. a b Commemoration at the Ehrenfriedhof Oderbrück on Nordharz-portal.de, accessed on December 28, 2018

Web links

Commons : Ehrenfriedhof Oderbrück  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 51 ° 46 ′ 57 ″  N , 10 ° 32 ′ 48.7 ″  E