Edewecht war graveyard
The Edewecht war graveyard is a cemetery for over 400 German soldiers, but also for some prisoners of war and forced laborers from the Second World War in Edewecht, Lower Saxony .
prehistory
Between April 14 and May 3, 1945, 412 German soldiers, around 300 Allied soldiers and 104 civilians lost their lives as a result of the fierce fighting over the Edewechterdamm bridgehead . Because of the human and material superiority of the Allied forces, the German defense in this situation was already pointless from the point of view of that time.
Creation of the cemetery
While the civilian dead could be buried in the Edewechter church cemetery after the end of the war, it was decided in August 1945 that the German soldiers, who had been buried in field graves during the fighting, would be reburied in a new central "war cemetery". The design of the military cemetery was carried out by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge . The Edewechter facility was the first war cemetery that the Volksbund built after the end of the Second World War.
Within a year, the dead were recovered from 251 field graves. 234 remains were buried in two large grave fields in the new cemetery, and the remaining corpses were transferred to their homeland. In the following years , fallen soldiers from the nearby battle areas of Bösel , Altenoythe , Strücklingen and Barßel were reburied here.
The inauguration of the Edewechter war cemetery took place on May 22, 1949. Today there are 405 German soldiers' graves here. 90 of the 400 stone crosses bear the inscription "Unknown Soldier". The proportion of young soldiers aged 16 or 17 who died here as the inexperienced “ last contingent ” of the Wehrmacht is alarmingly high .
The Canadian soldiers who fell in the fighting were reburied in 1948 in the central Canadian war graveyard of the “Canadian War Cemetery” in Holten, the Netherlands, and the British dead were transferred to their homeland.
Remodeling
In 1958/59 the first redesign took place on the south side, where since then a memorial cross commemorates dead, missing and deceased prisoners of war in the east as well as civilian victims of flight and displacement . In 1964 a local memorial was added to the entrance area of the cemetery. The central structure is a flat cube, the sides of which bear the names of the 122 soldiers who fell from Edewecht. On the western boundary wall of the cemetery, older plaques of honor from the wars of 1866 , 1870 / '71 and 1914 / '18 from the demolished war memorial in South Edewecht (originally Hauptstraße - confluence with today's street “Am Esch”) were attached.
The last reburial of three war dead took place in 1976, whose bones were found during road construction work. In the same year, on the north side of the entrance area, a small, separate grave field was created for 19 foreign war dead who were transferred here from the church cemetery. There are seven Russian prisoners of war and 12 forced laborers from Poland or the Netherlands (Dimytro Dacko, Petro Diarzuk, Wasil Jaroschewitsch, Zygmunt Kazimierczek, Pletr Krintschenko, Johannes Lippold, Wawara Lookin, Michal Mlotkiewiecz, Genovefa Muller, Stercpan Schmertinzy, Viktor Mikola Schopjak, Nikolai Tarazin, Anna Wotoszyn and five unknown Russians) that the first were used and the Second world war in agriculture and local peat industry.
literature
- Albrecht Eckhardt (Hrsg.): History of the community Edewecht in the Ammerland. Isensee, Oldenburg 2005, ISBN 3-89995-226-X .
Web links
Coordinates: 53 ° 7 ′ 47.5 ″ N , 7 ° 59 ′ 19.3 ″ E