Marienbad (Czech: Mariánské Lázně) was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List of Important European Spa Towns in 2021. The municipal cemetery includes German cemeteries.
Occupancy
4.090 dead are buried there - soldiers who lost their lives during the Second World War, but also civilians. "Evacuated" from Germany, they had died in the city's hospitals. in 1943, the "Charité" clinic was moved from Berlin to Mariánské Lázně. This explains why the graves in question were known as "Berlin graves" or "Berlin cemetery".
As a result of the Munich Agreement of 1938 (cession of the Sudetenland to Germany) and the subsequent occupation of the Sudetenland by German troops, Mariánské Lázně belonged to the "Reichsgau Sudetenland of the German Reich" until the end of the Second World War. The town remained undestroyed.
After the end of the Second World War, there were more than 18,000 graves of German war dead in over 1,600 municipalities in what is now the Czech Republic.
It was only after the fall of the Iron Curtain that the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V.) was able to become officially active in 1990. Although the former Czechoslovakian government had formally accepted the provisions of international humanitarian law, it remained almost impossible to care for the German war graves.
To this day, the Volksbund's work is based on Article 30 of the German-Czechoslovak Neighborhood Treaty of 27 February 1992, in which both governments declare their intention to protect the war graves and make it possible to record and care for them. A German-Czech war graves agreement is still pending.
History
The redesign of the site began in 1991. In the first construction phase, the grave fields were leveled and planted with grass. The soldiers' graves received granite crosses on which the names, dates of life and ranks can be read. A high cross forms the center of the cemetery. An open cemetery house (altan) marks the transition from the war cemetery to the "Berlin Cemetery". The grave slabs were moved there to create a lawn area. A memorial slogan can be read on a small square. Next to it is a sculpture depicting a mourner. It was created by the sculptor Vítězslav Eibl.
Names and dates are immortalized on granite crosses on the individual graves in the "Berlin Cemetery". The collective graves are marked by groups of symbolic crosses. The names of those buried here are inscribed on the granite lecterns. The redesigned memorial square of the "Berlin Cemetery" with the sculpture is framed by twelve bronze plaques with the names of the buried dead. The altar contains a memorial book with the names of the dead who were not recovered in western and northern Bohemia. The names of the unknown deceased can be read on a round stele.
This war cemetery was opened to the public on October 24, 1992 and a commemorative event was held on October 14, 1995 to mark the completion of the construction work.
Special feature
A "Park of Reconciliation" was created outside the Mariánské Lázně municipal cemetery, which was opened as part of the commemorative event at the end of the construction work on October 14, 1995. Since 1997, an information board in the altar of the cemetery has commemorated the decades of reconciliation work carried out by the Volksbund-Landesverband Berlin in the context of youth camps with the care of war graves.
