A German war cemetery in the grounds of the Poznañ-Mi³ostowo municipal cemetery is the resting place of the dead of the Second World War.
Description of the cemetery
A central path leads to the memorial site near the common graves. All those buried who are known by name are listed there on 19 bronze plaques in alphabetical order. Desk-shaped stone plaques mark the areas where war dead were later buried.
Burial
Around 478,000 German soldiers lost their lives in Poland during the Second World War. The War Graves Commission has received casualty reports for around 300,000 of the dead. Around 19,000 death and burial sites are registered.
In Poznañ-Mi³ostowo, the mortal remains of an estimated 5,000 soldiers who died in the battles for "Fortress Poznañ" in early 1945 or later as prisoners of war are buried in three common graves. From 1945 to 1948, 3,793 war dead from 124 graves in and around Poznán were transferred to the cemetery. in 1957, 1,185 Germans who died in the Kuhndorf Soviet prisoner of war camp were also laid to rest in collective graves there.
To this day, war dead from graves in several hundred places in the Pi³a, Konin, Kalisz, Zielona Góra and Poznañ areas have been reburied.
History
The work of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. in Poland was initially based on agreements made in 1989 (formation of the German-Polish Commission) and 1991 ("Treaty on Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation"). A bilingual memorial plaque was placed on a wooden cross as early as 1988. in 1994, the German-Polish "Remembrance" Foundation was established to support the Volksbund's reburial, construction and maintenance measures.
The German-Polish War Graves Agreement was signed on December 8, 2003 and came into force on January 19, 2005. As in the other countries of the former Eastern Bloc, central cemeteries for the dead of the Second World War have been established in Poland - Poznañ-Mi³ostowo is one of ten. In addition, some large existing cemeteries are being preserved.
In order to create space for additional burials, the Poznañ-Mi³ostowo war cemetery was redesigned in 1993, which also affected the memorial square. It was rededicated on October 22, 1994 at the end of the work.
Special feature
The German war cemetery in Poznañ-Mi³ostowo is the only surviving historical German military cemetery in the Poznañ area.
