The German war cemetery in Hunkovce in north-eastern Slovakia is located on the edge of a small village. The dead of the Second World War are buried there.
Description of the cemetery
Visitors enter the site through a roofed wooden entrance building, a so-called "Vstup". The vstup and the cemetery enclosure are made of identical materials: Wood and local slate stone. The wide path leading up the slope to the memorial site is also paved with slate stones.
This is built into the slope and enclosed by a semi-circular wall. A wooden high cross stands in the middle of the memorial square. Water flows from a spring above the cemetery into a hollow at the foot of the cross and from there further down the slope through a channel to a small planted water basin in the entrance area.
The names of the dead who could not be recovered are listed in a metal book. It lies on a brick lectern at the memorial site. There are grave crosses on the graves with four names on each side. Bronze plaques on horizontal granite slabs along the path commemorate the dead who rest "among the unknown" in this cemetery.
Burial
Around 35,000 German dead from the Second World War are believed to have been buried in the territory of today's Slovak Republic. To date, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. has buried more than 16,000 German soldiers at six war cemeteries that it has created for this purpose. The Volksbund has around 3,000 individual records of war dead from the First World War.
The cemetery in Hunkovce was established by the Wehrmacht. Its structures were largely preserved over the decades. More than 3,000 German soldiers are buried there who died during the Second World War in the battles on the Dukla Pass nine kilometers to the north.
History
The Volksbund's work began in 1990 in the east of what was then Czechoslovakia. The first collective cemetery was inaugurated in Zborov in 1992. humenné and Prešov followed in 1994. The Hunkovce war cemetery was completed in 1995, the one in Važec - the largest in Slovakia - in 1998, and the cemetery in Bratislava was inaugurated in 2000. This was followed by the restoration and consolidation of cemeteries from the First World War. Today, around 16,000 German soldiers are buried in six Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. cemeteries in what is now the Slovak Republic
The legal basis for the work of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. was initially the German-Czechoslovak Neighborhood Treaty of February 27, 1992. On March 2, 1999, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Slovak Republic concluded a war graves agreement, which came into force on August 12, 2000.
In the course of the complete redesign of the site in Hunkovce, the Volksbund expanded it and designed it as a collective cemetery. The war cemetery was opened to the public on October 8, 1995.
Special feature
In the center of Hunkovce, a listed church from the 18th century - a three-part Baroque wooden building with a low stone foundation - stands in a cemetery. A Greek Catholic church from the 1930s on the opposite side of the street is also in the Baroque style. On the other side of the street, opposite the German war cemetery Hunkovce, there is another military cemetery from the First World War.
