Russian military cemetery Klein-Zimmer

Entrance area from the southwest

At least 379 Soviet prisoners of war are buried here in an area of around 1000 m ²

Memorial stone on the north-western edge of the cemetery

Plant from the southwest

Decorated memorial stone for the 75th anniversary of the surrender of Hitlerite Germany and the end of the Second World War in Europe

The Russian military cemetery Klein-Zimmer is a war graveyard in Klein -zimmer , today part of Groß -zimmer in the Darmstadt-Dieburg district , between Darmstadt and Aschaffenburg south of Dieburg . 435 Soviet prisoners of war are said to be buried there; the identity documents of 379 dead are known to date (as of August 2017).

history

From 1941 to 1945, Soviet prisoners of war were buried here who had died in the hospital , actually a prisoner-of-war camp , at 5 Burgstrasse in Klein -zimmer. This was located on the site of what was then the St. Joseph House , which was founded as an educational institution in 1869 by the Mainz Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler . In 1939 the property was confiscated by the NSDAP and used as a prison hospital. Taken over by the SS as a reserve hospital for the main camp IX / b Bad Orb from 1941 onwards , almost 500 prisoners of war are killed here as a result of brutal forced labor , illness , wounds or starvation . They were buried on the site made available by the municipality in autumn 1941. At the beginning in individual graves, at the end of the war also in mass graves . At the beginning there were wooden tablets above the graves with the presumed prisoner number / registration number of the soldiers who disappeared at the end of the war. In the post-war period, the burial mounds, which had almost all sunk, were leveled.

In the 1950s, a four-meter high Orthodox cross was erected for the dead. In 1960, after long negotiations by the Volksbund Deutscher Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the facility was rebuilt with the help of German students and American pioneers by US troops stationed nearby and inaugurated on August 20, 1961 by the then Hessian Minister of Education, Ernst Schütte . Commemorations have been held here every year since 1962. After the community of Klein-Zimmer lost its independence in 1977 and was incorporated into Groß-Zimmer , the new large community also took over the maintenance of the military cemetery.

In 2017, 27 young people from seven nations from the project We write your names from the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge started to design evaluated names of the dead with their life data as name boards in ceramic. 27 name boards were handed over to the community of Groß-Zimmer. Giulia Miles from Italy, who was involved in the project, said about the aim of the project: “ If we die without having a real grave, then we can be forgotten. These people here have been left without humanity. We are now giving them back at least their names with the tablets. Then there are no longer 13 symbolic crosses here. But many names. “A worthy implementation of this idea, in order to wrest all dead from oblivion, is still pending, as the community is responsible for the design of the cemetery.

description

The facility is around 50 m × 20 m in size and is located on the Reinheimer Hohl district area . It was redesigned several times and is now maintained by the city of Groß-Zimmer. The SW-NE-oriented system is delimited on three sides by a tree hedge and has its entrance area in the southwest. The mass graves could not be evaluated later and are symbolically represented by a dozen death crosses; at the north-western end a memorial stone in Russian and German indicates the cemetery and the memorial.

annotation

The name of the military cemetery is misleading, since not Russian , but deceased Soviet prisoners of war of the Red Army from the Second World War were buried here.