Homecoming memorial

Homecoming monuments are memorials that commemorate those returning from World War II .

history

During the Second World War, millions of German and Austrian soldiers became prisoners of war . While the great majority returned in the first post-war years, many hundreds of thousands of soldiers were still detained in the Soviet Union . It was not until 1955/1956 that the Soviet Union released the last German prisoners of war. The question of the fate of the prisoners preoccupied the West German public in the post-war years . With numerous monuments and demonstrations, their fate was repeatedly pointed out.

The driving force behind the erection of homecoming monuments was initially the Association of Returnees, Prisoners of War and Members of the Missing Persons in Germany . From its founding in 1950 to the mid-1960s, the member groups of the association created around 1,800 memorials to commemorate the prisoners of war. Today there are only a few

List of homecoming monuments

Germany

Art	place	year	image	annotation
Homecoming memorial	Bad Hersfeld	1960		The sculptor Wilhelm Hugues , himself a former prisoner of war, designed a larger than life sculpture out of sheet copper. It is an emaciated returnees in a uniform coat and winter hat.
Homecoming memorial	Bielefeld , North Rhine-Westphalia	1953		The monument in front of the town hall bears the inscription "We are waiting for you"
Homecoming memorial	on the buses , Baden-Württemberg	0
Our memorial for peace	Frankfurt (Oder)	1998		Design and execution by Christian Roehl
Friedland Memorial	Friedland , Lower Saxony	1966/67
Homecoming memorial	Hamburg-Volksdorf	0
Homecoming memorial	Herleshausen , Lower Saxony	0
Homecoming memorial	Rötenbach , Baden-Wuerttemberg	0	0
Homecoming memorial	Wuppertal , North Rhine-Westphalia	1955