Neckenmarkt military cemetery

Neckenmarkt military cemetery in KG Haschendorf

The Neckenmarkt military cemetery was created in 1916 as a supplement to the Neckenmarkt prisoner-of-war camp in what was then German-West Hungary - today Burgenland . There were buried prisoners of war who died here, as well as civilians from Bosnia-Herzegovina who had been removed from their homeland in the war zone because of suspected political unreliability.

history

The Neckenmarkt prisoner of war camp comprised properties in the cadastral communities of Neckenmarkt and Haschendorf . The Neckenmarkt military cemetery is located on a 4410 square meter property in Haschendorf, where it was laid out in 1916 on a property confiscated under the Hungarian War Service Act of 1912, later expanded and reduced to its current size at an unknown point in time. As a result, an unknown number of graves came to lie outside the cemetery and are now forgotten on agricultural land.

While there are unclear and contradicting information about the number of deceased soldiers buried here, there is hardly any information about the civilian internees who were also buried here. According to a report from the municipality of Neckenmarkt to the Burgenland provincial government from 1936, 495 military personnel and 328 interned civilians were buried in the military cemetery. The source for this information was the death register, which lacks a volume with an estimated up to 1,500 entries. With 177 members of the military and 225, however , the state register of deaths gives different numbers. On the occasion of one of the frequent inspections of the cemetery by a representative of the Reich Governor for Lower Danube, the number of graves of military personnel was set at 713 on September 24, 1940. In addition to these, there were those of the 95 Italians named on the memorial stone, two of whom had been transferred to Italy at an unknown time. The mass graves of civilian internees were not an issue.

In 1922 a memorial in the form of an obelisk was erected for the Italian soldiers buried here . The consecration took place as part of a military ceremony with representatives of Austrian authorities, the armed forces and an Italian delegation.

Correspondence from 1936 between the municipality and the state in which Neckenmarkt is seeking reimbursement of the maintenance costs for the military cemetery by Burgenland has been preserved. There are different statements about the state of preservation of the cemetery during this time.

During the Nazi era , on behalf of the governor of Niederdonau, the National Socialist authorities tried to give the cemetery an attractive appearance in order to make a good impression on the Italian alliance partner. A planned transfer of the remains of the Italians to the Vienna Central Cemetery did not materialize.

Towards the end of the Second World War, in 1944, Neckenmarkt, which had taken over the care and maintenance of the military cemetery, although it was in the municipality of Haschendorf, handed it over to the municipality of Haschendorf on the grounds that it would no longer be able to handle the associated administrative and labor costs can.

literature

• Ernst Mihalkovits: The prisoner of war and internment camp of World War I in Neckenmarkt Mittleres Burgenland 1915 - 1918 (dissertation), Vienna, March 2003

Coordinates: 47 ° 36 ′ 23.8 "  N , 16 ° 34 ′ 23.4"  E