Sandbostel war cemetery
The Sandbostel war cemetery is located at the historical site of the former Sandbostel camp cemetery, where the dead from the Stalag XB Sandbostel prisoner of war camp and prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp were buried.
history
The prisoner of war camp Stalag XB Sandbostel was a camp for prisoners of war , Italian military internees , civilian internees (such as members of the British merchant navy ), participants in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and, shortly before the end of the war, also for around 9500 concentration camp prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp and its satellite camps.
In September 1939, several thousand Polish soldiers were the first prisoners of war to arrive in the Sandbostel camp south of Bremervörde , in a moorland area between the Elbe and Weser rivers. The prisoners of war were used in numerous places in the North German war and agriculture . There were mass deaths from hunger, epidemics, exhaustion and violence in the autumn and winter of 1941/42 among the Soviet prisoners of war and in April / May 1945 among the concentration camp inmates deported to Sandbostel. The dead in the camp were buried in various places, the number has not yet been clarified, the number is estimated between 8,000 and 50,000 dead. After the war, the bones of the dead were exhumed and transferred to the countries of origin France, Belgium and Great Britain; those of the Italians were reburied in the central cemetery in Hamburg-Öjendorf.
Camp cemetery in Parnewinkel
The first deceased prisoners of war of the Stalag XB were buried in Parnewinkel, twelve kilometers away, in an old prisoner of war cemetery from the First World War . While the prisoners of war were usually buried in individual graves, the Soviet prisoners of war were buried in mass graves in which the dead were buried next to and on top of each other. Fifteen deceased prisoners of war from the First World War and around 86 deceased prisoners of war and civil internees from the Second World War rest on the "Parnewinkel War Cemetery". Eighteen Serbs, twelve members of the Red Army, three Belgians and one Chinese, who were buried in individual graves, rest here. About forty Soviet prisoners of war were buried in a mass grave. The place in Parnewinkel was exhausted after one hundred and ninety prisoners of war had been buried in this cemetery and a new cemetery was established in Sandbostel.
Camp cemetery in Sandbostel
The state health department of the then Bremervörde district then issued an expert opinion for an area about two to three kilometers away from the Stalag XB east of the village of Sandbostel. The composition of the soil was suitable, the groundwater level was deep, the nearest human settlement was sufficiently far away, so there was no need to worry about odor nuisance. With this report, the district president in Stade approved the new prisoner-of-war cemetery in 1940. The first burials took place in this cemetery in early 1941. The camp cemetery was divided into different areas according to the nationality of the dead. There were separate burial grounds for Polish and Yugoslav prisoners of war and from 1943 also for Italian military internees. The Soviet dead were buried in a separate area, which was larger because of the high number of dead and consisted of mass graves.
New memorial
Grave of Erich Kleeberg
Nameless concentration camp graves
Student project name bricks for Soviet prisoners of war
Concentration camp dead transferred from the area
Soviet memorial, concentration camp prisoners
In the summer of 1945, the Soviet military administration had a memorial erected for the Soviet dead at the Sandbostel camp cemetery with the inscription in three languages: “Here, 46,000 Russian soldiers and officers rest, tortured to death in Nazi captivity”. In 1949 the entire cemetery was leveled and dug up. The 53 Soviet mass grave rows were combined into 14 "collective graves" above ground on a much smaller area. Today's grave complex therefore does not correspond to the actual location of the dead.
In 1956 the Soviet memorial was demolished because of the "too high number" of deaths indicated on it at the instigation of the Bremervörde district and the Lower Saxony Ministry of the Interior . In 1956, as part of this major redesign of the cemetery, the reburial of almost 3,000 concentration camp prisoners from various mass graves in the region was largely completed. There were many of the concentration camp prisoners who died on the transport from Neuengamme to Sandbostel and a great number of concentration camp prisoners died in the camp because they did not receive any food or medical care after their arrival.
Cemetery for prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates
Today the cemetery consists of four collective graves with Soviet prisoners of war in the left part of the cemetery.
- The dead rest under the surface, which was redesigned in the post-war period, in seventy rows of mass graves
- about a hundred individual graves of Yugoslav and unknown prisoners of war
- about seventy individual graves of Polish and unknown prisoners of war
and in the right part of the cemetery:
- 2,397 individual graves of unidentifiable concentration camp inmates who were relocated from the camp area by the French grave service between 1954 and 1956
- 41 unknown concentration camp inmates of an evacuation transport from Neuengamme who were reburied from a mass grave near Brokel in 1963
- about 400 unknown concentration camp inmates of an evacuation transport from Neuengamme who were reburied from a mass grave near Brillit
The national veterans' associations of prisoners of war and the organizations of surviving concentration camp inmates such as the Amicale Internationale de Neuengamme worked after the war to ensure that the history of the Stalag XB was not forgotten and that the gravesite of the dead by Sandbostel were kept in a worthy condition . The state of Lower Saxony had been responsible for their care since 1946 ; Since 1973 the cemetery has been looked after by the municipality of Sandbostel on behalf of the state.
Weather protection and information house
The Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge has built a weather protection and information house for project work by school classes on the Sandbostel war cemetery. The house was planned and built independently by students from several vocational schools in spring / summer 2003 and has been available since then. Since 2011, adolescents have been making clay bricks with the names and dates of the victims' lives and placing them in concrete steles made by the students of the vocational schools in Zeven .
Literature and Sources
- Werner Borgsen, Klaus Volland: Stalag XB Sandbostel. On the history of a prisoner of war and concentration camp reception camp in Northern Germany 1939–1945 . Bremen, Edition Temmen , 3rd edition, 2003
- Federal Agency for Civic Education: Memorials for the victims of National Socialism. Volume 1, Bonn 1996, pp. 459-461.
- Lower Saxony Ministry of Culture: Memorial work in Lower Saxony - 2nd edition, Hanover 1998, p. 20f.
- Katharina Dehnke: Repressed memory. Dealing with Soviet memorials in Germany after 1945 using the example of the memorial for Soviet dead in the Sandbostel prisoner of war camp. Master thesis. University of Trier, 1999
- Report from a Belgian NCO, a prisoner of war in Sandbostel from 1940 to 1945 (online)
- Report from a Russian prisoner of war about the funerals ( online )
Individual evidence
Coordinates: 53 ° 24 ′ 40.5 ″ N , 9 ° 8 ′ 20.2 ″ E