War cemetery Haus Spital
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The Haus Spital war cemetery is an honorary cemetery in Nienberge , not far from the Rüschhaus , where 816 war dead from the First and Second World Wars rest. Since these are mainly of Russian nationality, the cemetery is popularly known as the Russian cemetery . Poles, Ukrainians, Volga Germans and an Indian also rest there.
history
In 1914, interned French prisoners of war laid the cemetery of honor in the Schonebeck peasantry for their deceased comrades from the Haus Spital prisoner-of-war camp, which was built in the barracks of the military training area of the same name. In the course of the war Belgian, English, Italian, Russian and Serbian prisoners of war and their dead came to this. With up to 50,000 prisoners, the Haus Spital prisoner-of-war camp became the largest of its kind in north-west Germany. In 1918 Eugenio Pacelli , who later became Pope Pius XII, visited the camp. The imprisoned French architect A. Duthoi designed the cemetery complex; the entrance gate and the memorial were created in 1916 by the French sculptor Broucke. The memorial is formed by a stone base, above which an obelisk rises, on which the English royal coat of arms, the coat of arms of the Russian tsarist empire and the Belgian royal coat of arms of the Gallic rooster are united.
Between 1914 and 1918, Russians, French and Belgians, and occasionally English and Italians, were buried here. With the exception of the Russians, all of the dead were transferred to their homeland or to a central cemetery. During the Second World War, eleven Western Allied pilots and 23 French were at Haus Spital . 53 Italians and around 200 war dead from the Soviet Union are buried. Here, too, the same practice prevailed after the end of the war.
In August 2015, hitherto unknown perpetrators broke almost 500 bronze plaques with the names and dates of life of those buried here out of the gravestones, presumably to sell them as scrap metal. The material damage is estimated at around 45,000 euros. The signs, which weighed around 500 grams and were cast in the 1950s, were unique and each had its own mold made for casting.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Westfälische Nachrichten of August 25, 2015: "I am in tears"
Coordinates: 51 ° 58 ′ 56.6 ″ N , 7 ° 33 ′ 37.1 ″ E