The Hungarian-German war cemetery Székesfehérvár is located on the grounds of the abandoned civil cemetery "Heiliger Geist". German and Hungarian dead from the First and Second World Wars are buried there.
Description of the cemetery
An avenue leads to the central high cross. Granite crosses bearing two names on each side mark the German soldiers' graves. Name steles have been erected on a small memorial square to the right of the high cross. They commemorate German war dead who rest among the unknown or whose remains could not be recovered.
Occupancy
Around 54,000 German soldiers lost their lives in Hungary during the Second World War. The names of 35,000 of these war dead are known. There are 617 recorded deaths from the First World War. The graves of two thirds of the deceased are spread over 120 different locations.
The first negotiations with Hungary on the care of war graves began as early as 1963. In accordance with the 1965 resolution of the Red Cross societies, Hungary was the only Eastern European country to exchange war grave records with the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V.).
In Székesfehérvàr, the War Graves Commission was allowed to mark some of the 750 graves in the cemetery, which had already fallen into disrepair, with wooden crosses after 1964. However, the overall condition of the cemetery remained unsatisfactory.
in 1987, the Székesfehérvàr city council announced plans to open up parts of the cemetery grounds for commercial use. Negotiations with the Hungarian Red Cross made it possible to secure the war graves. By the spring of 1990, the Volksbund reburial service had succeeded in recovering most of the German dead and burying them in individual graves in another part of the cemetery. During the same period, reburials were carried out from Szabadbattyan and other grave sites.
History
Székesfehérvàr is one of the first war cemeteries that the Volksbund was allowed to create in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. At the time of its inauguration on June 1, 1991, around 1,000 German war dead were buried there. After the Hungarian authorities made a site available to the Volksbund for the expansion of the facility, Székesfehérvàr became the collective cemetery for Fejér County. The number of burials has more than doubled due to the addition of new beds.
The German-Hungarian War Graves Agreement came into force on December 23, 1994. The War Graves Commission now looks after 16 war cemeteries in Hungary. Its official contact is the Ministry of Defense, Department of Military Tradition and War Graves Care.
Special feature
The war cemetery in Székesfehérvàr includes a Hungarian military cemetery with horizontal name plaques and oak death steles. At the back of the site are the graves of around 1,200 members of the Austro-Hungarian army who died in the First World War. Name plaques and concrete crosses mark these graves. A bell tower and various Hungarian memorial plaques adorn the individual grave blocks.
