Gronenfelde war cemetery

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The restored war cemetery after its rededication in December 2018.

The Gronenfelde war cemetery near today's homecoming settlement in the Gronenfelde district of Frankfurt is a burial site for prisoners of war from the First World War . The prisoner of war cemetery existed from 1915 to 1922. The majority of the buried soldiers were of Russian nationality, which led to the colloquial term "Russian cemetery".

history

prehistory

On August 1, 1914, the First World War started a war on two fronts for Germany. In the first seven months of the war, the imperial troops captured around 650,000 soldiers from the tsarist army. Several thousand of them were brought to Frankfurt (Oder), where first a large tent camp and later a massive barrack camp were built on the area of ​​today's homecoming settlement. Frankfurt was on the main railway connection between Berlin and Moscow. At the beginning of January 1915, around 13,000 internees were housed in the POW camp.

On October 10, 1918, 22,986 internees were counted, 634 of them civilians. The prisoners belonged to the most varied of European nations and ethnic groups. The largest share of this was made up of Russians who fought as soldiers for the Tsarist Empire, but also Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, Balts, Finns, Russian-Germans, Jews, Muslim Bashkirs and Caucasians. Likewise, prisoners of war from other "enemy states" at the time were interned in Frankfurt (Oder), including Italians, French, Belgians, Serbs, Romanians and British.

inauguration

The inauguration on July 25, 1915 as part of an ecumenical service (above: Protestant pastor, below from left Catholic priest, Orthodox Pope, field rabbi Martin Salomonski as well as garrison pastor Eich and two parish priests )

A total of 812 prisoners of war died in the camp, including women and a Turk from the Ottoman Empire, allied with Germany. The causes of death could be diverse, on the one hand war injuries, but also infections due to the difficult nutritional situation, especially typhus and tuberculosis . The deceased were buried near the camp on the area of ​​the disused Körner shaft, not far from the former railway line via the Grube Vaterland station (near Kliestow ).

On July 25, 1915, the prisoner of war cemetery was officially inaugurated as part of an ecumenical service and in the presence of the guards and many prisoners. Present were the Protestant pastors Wenzel and Eich, three Protestant parish priests, the Catholic priest Warnecke, the Frankfurt field rabbi Martin Salomonski and a priest of the Russian Orthodox Confession, who stood together in front of the pulpit. The Orthodox priest inaugurated the memorial created by the captured Russian sculptor Staltmann. It bears a tsar's eagle and dedications in German and Russian.

investment

Depending on the religious affiliation, the grave was decorated with a wooden cross, a crescent moon or a Star of David with the name of the deceased. The deceased of the Jewish faith - referred to as Mosaic in the death books - were each given a sandstone tomb around 1935, with the name carved in Latin on the front and in Hebrew on the back. Fragments of three tombstones were found during later clean-up work and could be assigned to the buried.

Memorial stone for the French dead

In 2014, a fragment of the memorial plaque for the twelve dead in France with a dedication in French was found during clean-up work. Remains of the Italian memorial still exist in the north-western part of the cemetery. In the 1920s, the French dead were transferred to their homeland, and the remains of the Italians and British found their final resting place in the Stahnsdorf-Süd military cemetery near Berlin. The graves of the soldiers of the tsarist army remained.

post war period

Although the First World War ended on November 11, 1918, soldiers of the Russian army were buried in Gronenfelde until mid-1921. As early as March 1918, Soviet Russia and Germany had agreed on an exchange of prisoners in the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty, but due to the turmoil of the revolution in Russia and the armistice agreement with the victorious powers of November 1918, Germany was forbidden from releasing Russian prisoners as soon as they were in Lenin could support his struggle. This explains the note in the death register from 1921 that a "soldier of the Russian Bolshevik Army", the farmer Jefim Bulawka from the Bendera Rayon, died at the age of 23 in the supply hospital. Due to the civil war in Russia, the last prisoner of war was only able to return to his homeland in 1922.

From 1919 to 1924 around 160 deceased people who had come from the east because their homeland now belonged to Poland were buried in the cemetery. Several masonry grave borders are a reminder of this. According to Articles 225 and 226 of the Versailles Treaty , the fenced-in war cemetery had to be "treated and maintained with respect". According to documents from the city archives, the cemetery was tended by master gardener Karl Jäckel until the end of 1944 on behalf of and for the account of the Reich Treasury.

Decay

From 1945 the prisoner of war cemetery began to decline. The first devastation occurred when Wehrmacht soldiers built trenches in the area; traces of the splinter trenches still exist. After the war, the wooden crosses were used by local residents for heating out of necessity. However, the main cause of the decline in the period that followed was the deliberate disinterest of the new Frankfurt city administration and the Soviet occupying power. In local historiography, the preservation of the wooden Heilandskapelle ("Russian Church " in the vernacular) was honored and the history of the camp was researched and described in this context, but the cemetery was not mentioned.

Some of the stone steles with the names of the buried soldiers of the Tsarist army.

Restoration

Many people who work full-time with local history were unaware of the Gronenfelde prisoner-of-war cemetery until 1992. It was not until the letter from the Russian-German Linda Ljubow Hass to the Frankfurt parish of Gertraud-Marien, which was looking for the grave of her grandfather Friedrich Seel, that a research process began. The contribution of the church archivist Günter Fromm for the “Brandenburgische Blätter” of the Märkische Oderzeitung from November 1992 was the first attempt to inform the public.

Apart from the fact that the city administration placed the burial site as a wooded island under nature protection and thus counteracted a possible overbuilding, nothing happened for years. In June 2011 a private initiative group "KGF First World War Frankfurt (Oder)" was founded, which went public with a statement to the press and an entry on the Internet. The historian Günter Fromm researched further names of buried soldiers of the Russian army on the basis of an alphabetically compiled but incomplete list of deaths by employees of the registry office. The remains of 581 people lie on the war cemetery , 574 of them from the Russian Empire and 7 Serbs. Compatriots became aware of the “Russenfriedhof” through the Internet and, together with members of the German-Russian association “Rodina” from Frankfurt, volunteered to help with the clean-up work. The cross stored in the Heilandskapelle was also put back on the now renovated field stone pulpit.

On the 100th anniversaries of the beginning of the war (2014) and the inauguration (2015), there were devotions at the war cemetery, attended by representatives from the Russian embassy, ​​the city of Frankfurt, the Protestant parish and the local Jewish community. On the occasion of the end of the First World War, the cemetery was opened to the public on November 17, 2018 as a war cemetery in accordance with the Graves Act. Metal plaques with the names of the buried were placed on granite steles.

literature

  • Horst Kuhnke: The rise and fall of a "Russian cemetery" - the graveyard of the prisoner-of-war camp in Gronenfelde . In: From the history of the homecoming settlement, Gronenfelder Blätter, number 2, published by the Förderverein Heilandskapelle e. V in the homecoming settlement in Frankfurt (Oder), Frankfurt (Oder) 2002.
  • Klaus Eichler: The rehabilitation of the POW cemetery of the First World War in Frankfurt (Oder) - On the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War 1914–1918 , Frankfurt (Oder) 2014.
  • Günter Fromm: After 100 years - devotion on the occasion of the inauguration of the cemetery for prisoners of war , in: Community letter Evangelical Church Community Frankfurt (Oder) - Lebus, October / November 2015 edition, Frankfurt (Oder) 2015.

See also

Web links

Commons : Gronenfelde war cemetery  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Thomas Gutke: Back in the Frankfurt memory - MOZ.de. In: moz.de. November 11, 2018, accessed September 19, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Peace Treaty of Versailles , Part VI. Prisoners of War and Tombs, Section II. Tombs, Articles 225 and 226.
  3. ↑ a b Frankfurt-Oder: The forgotten Russian cemetery. In: svz.de. April 10, 2014, accessed September 19, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Rediscovered and embellished - 100 years of the Frankfurt (Oder) war cemetery. In: rbb24.de. November 15, 2018, accessed September 19, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Выпуск программы "Время" в 21:00 17 ноября 2018 года. Новости. Первый канал. The rededication and commemoration of the end of the First World War in the news of the Pyerwyj Canal. In: 1tv.ru. November 17, 2018, Retrieved September 19, 2019 (Russian).

Coordinates: 52 ° 21 ′ 39.7 ″  N , 14 ° 31 ′ 14 ″  E