Forest cemetery Halbe
The Halbe forest cemetery is located in the municipality of Halbe in the Dahme-Spreewald district in Brandenburg and is one of the largest war cemeteries in Germany. Over 28,000 victims of the Second World War rest there , mostly in the pocket of Halbe Fallen, but also executed deserters of the Wehrmacht , forced laborers and those who died between 1945 and 1947 from the Soviet special camp Ketschendorf . It is supported by the Brandenburg State Association of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. maintained.
prehistory
When the Kessel Battle for Halbe was over on May 1, 1945 , burial work began for the few survivors. Around 40,000 German soldiers and civilians killed in the last week were scattered in Halbe and the surrounding forests. Until the beginning of June, temporary graves were dug in forests and along paths - for corpses and parts of corpses that were often unidentifiable by tanks and projectiles. The registration of the dead was initially secondary.
Emergence
Pastor Ernst Teichmann from Schierke in the Harz came to Halbe and advocated unifying the scattered graves. With the support of the Berlin-Brandenburg Church, he achieved what the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge had not yet achieved due to some resistance: In 1951, construction of the central cemetery in Halbe began on a seven-hectare wooded area under the direction of the Potsdam landscape architect Walter Funke and the gardener Karl Foerster . Frank Ehmke later took over Funke's duties. By 1956, more than 22,000 buried people had been reburied, of which 8,000 were identified. Even decades later, the isolated fallen from the woods were and are still being brought to the forest cemetery. Initially, the graves were mostly marked with numbered ceramic plates from Hedwig Bollhagen's Velten workshop . Later they were exchanged for cushion stones made of sandstone , which were inscribed with the names of the victims - as far as known. The grave slabs have been made of the more weather-resistant granite since 2002 .
More buried
In addition to the immediate victims of the Kesselschlacht, other people were buried. A Soviet prison camp existed in Ketschendorf near Fürstenwalde from April 1945 to February 1947 ( NKVD camp no.5). The Soviet secret service NKVD held almost 20,000 Germans prisoner there, including many young people. The approximately 6,000 people who perished there were buried in mass graves nearby. In 1952, shortly after their discovery during construction work, they were transferred to Halbe on the initiative of Pastor Teichmann. The remaining, rather small, part of those buried in the forest cemetery are soldiers who were executed by the Wehrmacht, as well as foreign internees and forced laborers.
Construction of the cemetery
Access to the cemetery grounds is from Baruther Strasse to the intersection of Ernst-Teichmann-Strasse and Am Friedhof . Here is a memorial for those who fell in World War I and the entrance to the community's civil cemetery. On this is the grave of Ernst Teichmann and, south of the small cemetery chapel, there are three other graves of children who died after 1945 while playing with remains of ammunition. Access to the forest cemetery is past a parking lot on Ernst-Teichmann-Straße. This access road was reduced in 2008 to a width of 2.50 meters. There were car parking spaces and a turning point for buses at the level of the community cemetery. From here a wide path leads south to a lounge and memorial room. In the single-storey, white plastered and L-shaped building with a gable roof, there is a name book with the victims whose names have been identified so far, as well as some seating. The room is shaped by a life-size sculpture by the German sculptor Yrsa von Leistner , which is intended to be a reminder of peace. To the left of the building is a bronze bell sculpture . It bears the title The Mourners and comes from the Russian sculptor Sergej Alexandrowitsch Tscherbakow . The larger than life, abstract figure shows a woman with her head bowed in mourning. She stretches her arms into the sky and holds a bell that rings on special occasions such as a new bed. A plaque placed in front of the sculpture describes its effect as follows: “A mother bowed down by war woes weeps for sons and fathers. She begs for peace with the bell hanging in her clasped hands ”. The sculpture is a replica of a much larger original that is in the German war cemetery Rossoshka near Volgograd . On June 22, 2001, on the occasion of a commemorative event on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, it was handed over to the care of the Volksbund by the Halbe Memorial Foundation . To the north of this sculpture is a wooden Latin cross , a few meters to the west is a memorial made of Saxon sandstone with the inscription “The dead admonish the dead to live for peace”. It was inaugurated on the Sunday of the Dead in 1960.
The area is divided into a total of eleven different blocks to make it easier to find individual graves. In grave area IX , for example, there are graves for the deceased from Ketschendorf. They were buried in 26 collective graves covered with stone tablets listing the names of all 4,621 dead. The inauguration took place on May 8, 2004. The victims of military justice were buried in grave field X, the Soviet forced laborers in grave field XI. There is a bedding area in the southern part, in which even today other bones find their final resting place. Around 2,200 dead have been added to around 40 embedding celebrations since the fall of the Wall . In grave field VI there is a grave of a child with the name " Noël ". Its history could be traced back to other fates as an example: The ten-year-old girl died at the end of April 1945 near Baruth / Mark while fleeing from the advancing troops. His parents could not be determined, so that it is assumed that the entire family was killed in the Halbe cauldron.
The Volksbund regularly embeds it in Halbe, as around 300 war dead are found and recovered in Brandenburg every year. The work of the Volksbund is supported by members of the Bundeswehr .
Culture of remembrance in the GDR
The government of the GDR struggled with soldiers' graves and often only reacted to pressure from church authorities or from abroad. The war experience was only discussed if it could be functionalized for the confrontation with the West, if it could be used to stage official anti-fascism or friendship with the Soviet Union. It was not until July 1971, in connection with the GDR's application for membership in the United Nations, that the Council of Ministers passed a resolution on the treatment of the graves of fallen and foreign civilians .
During the GDR era, the Halbe forest cemetery was spared any historical and political interpretations.
Neo-Nazi marches after 1990
That changed after the political change in the GDR and German reunification . The Halbe cemetery became a meeting place for old and neo-Nazis . The highlights were the marches on the day of national mourning in 1990 and 1991 with several thousand participants from the right-wing scene from the Federal Republic. With their memorial event for the fallen soldiers from the ranks of the Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS and Volkssturm, they tie in with the “heroes' commemorations” first introduced in the Weimar Republic . In the following years the assembly authority banned these assemblies in Halbe.
Due to a change in the case law of the Federal Administrative Court , the authorities' intentions to prohibit failed in 2003. Around 700 supporters of the Free Comradeships placed wreaths at the forest cemetery. The marches in Halbe were then mostly organized by the Comradeship Association Resistance North .
On Saturday, September 17, 2005, a memorial march was called for the last time in Halbe. More than 100 supporters of the right-wing scene were expected for this march, but only about 25 came. In order to set an example against right-wing extremism and to show presence, stands of the SPD, CDU and PDS were set up. However, since this march was planned at short notice, no official counter-demonstration could be organized. With the arrival of the right-wing demonstrators, the stands and posters of the parties were covered by the local police forces, as slogans against right-wing extremism were on banners in front of the stands. According to the police, these banners could not be reconciled with the election rally, so that they did not have to be visible to the demonstrators. Furthermore, residents of the village were taken into security custody during the march after they had carried A4 sheets of paper with the words “Against rights marches” in front of the demonstration.
In November 2005 and March 2006 right-wing extremists again marched in Halbe. While the demonstration on November 12th was thwarted by the failure to clear a blockade, the demonstration on March 11th, 2006 with almost 1000 participants went smoothly. In addition to instrumentalizing the day of national mourning, the right-wing extremist spectrum wanted to revive the tradition of “hero commemoration” from the time of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.
These celebrations used to take place on the fifth Sunday before Easter. After the end of the Second World War, the day of remembrance for those who died in the war was renamed and denazified as “ National Day of Mourning ”. With the five crosses of the war graves care and the relocation to the end of the church year , which closes with the Sunday of the dead , the day of remembrance was shifted to the area of Christian symbols and figures of thought.
Amendment to the law of assembly 2006
In future, marches in the area of the cemetery will be prohibited. On October 25, 2006, the state parliament of Brandenburg passed a "law on assemblies and lifts at and on grave sites (Gräberstätten-Versammlungsgesetz- GräbVersammlG)" with a large majority against the votes of the DVU . The law came into effect on October 31st.
On November 18, the day before the day of national mourning, neo-Nazis wanted to march again at the military cemetery in Halbe. Because of the change in the right of assembly, they registered the access road to the forest cemetery as a rally site, but this was not allowed by the regulatory authorities, as registrations for a simultaneous larger counter-demonstration by the nationwide "Action Alliance against Violence, Right-Wing Extremism and Xenophobia" (Democratic Day) had been submitted. After the neo-Nazis had received several permits for their events in recent years, the Frankfurt (Oder) police headquarters this time gave priority to the action alliance. The station forecourt in Halbe was assigned as a meeting place for the neo-Nazis. Urgent applications by the neo-Nazis against this at the Frankfurt / Oder Administrative Court and the Berlin-Brandenburg Higher Administrative Court were unsuccessful. The Federal Constitutional Court rejected an urgent motion directed against this by neo-Nazi Lars Jakobs . The right-wing extremists then evaded to Seelow to the Seelow Heights Memorial , the site of the battle for the Seelower Heights , where Christian Worch had registered a demonstration.
Education and meeting place in Halbe
The political appropriation of the dead by Halbe for a heroic commemoration or a generalized interpretation of the perpetrators contradicts Ernst Teichmann's idea: “They weren't heroes, they were men who wanted to go home”. In order to ensure that Pastor Ernst Teichmann's educational work and documentation were in line with this idea in the long term, the federal board of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge decided that the now closed “Denkwerkstatt Halbe” should be continued as “Bildungsstätte Halbe”. The new educational and meeting center of the German War Graves Commission was opened on June 26, 2013 by President Gunter Fritsch and President of the Volksbund Reinhard Führer . Various partners invested 1.2 million euros in the “old school” in Halbe during the three-year construction period. Around a third of the construction costs were raised by the Volksbund. In close cooperation with the state of Brandenburg , the district of Dahme-Spreewald , the office of Schenkenländchen and the municipality of Halbe, the Volksbund has created the basis for the implementation of this project and the structural, financial, personnel and content requirements for its implementation. In the immediate vicinity of the Halbe forest cemetery, the terrible events of April 1945 are now being conveyed to younger generations. For this purpose, a historian was hired by the Volksbund. He will continue to research the topic in Halbe and set up an exhibition. The Brandenburg reburial service of the Volksbund is now also located here. Over 300 casualties are still recovered in Brandenburg every year, often identified with the help of the German Office ( WASt ) in Berlin and embedded in a war cemetery in the state.
See also
Movies
literature
- Jan von Flocken , Michael Klonovsky , Christian Münter: The dead from "Freedom Square": Ketschendorf camp and Halbe cemetery. Two sites of Stalinist crimes in Germany. In: The morning. 24./25. February 1990.
- Jan von Flocken, Michael Klonovsky: Stalin's camp in Germany 1945–1950. Documentation, witness reports. Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-550-07488-3 .
- Jörg Mückler, Richard Hinderlich: Half. Report on a cemetery. 2nd Edition. Publisher Gerald Ramm, Woltersdorf / Schleuse 1997.
- Herbert Pietsch, Rainer Potratz, Meinhard Stark (eds.): Now the screams hang on me ... Halbe, A cemetery and its dead. Berlin 1995, Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-89468-203-5 .
- Meinhard Stark (ed.): Ernst Teichmann, pastor from the forest cemetery Halbe. Letters and notes 1950 to 1983. Brandenburg State Center for Political Education, Potsdam 1997.
Web links
- Entry in the monument database of the State of Brandenburg
- Audio guide for the forest cemetery in Halbe
- Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. via the Halbe military cemetery, accessed on July 7, 2012
- Rainer Potratz, Meinhard Stark (ed.): Ernst Teichmann: Pastor from the forest cemetery Halbe. Letters and records 1950 to 1983 (PDF file; 548 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V: Waldfriedhof Halbe KUTHAL / 5 / 4-2013.
- ^ Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V: Waldfriedhof Halbe GW 10 / 3-05.
- ↑ Initiative group internment camp Ketschendorf / special camp No. 5 e. V .: The road that led to death - The Soviet internment camp Ketschendorf special camp No. 5 , MH March 2013.
- ↑ Volksbund Brandenburg 2013
- ↑ Full text of the law ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ (Resolutions of November 9, 2006 - Ref .: 6 L 430, 433 and 441/06), PDF
- ↑ (Decision of November 16, 2006 - OVG 1 S 143.06) [1]
- ↑ MAZ online June 27, 2013
- ↑ Volksbund.de
- ^ MOZ online: Another 66 war dead from the Oderbruch buried
Coordinates: 52 ° 6 ′ 16.7 " N , 13 ° 41 ′ 38.8" E