Lich-Arnsburg

The cemetery, which dates back to 1959/60, is home to 453 dead. Most of them died during or shortly after the Second World War: Soviet prisoners of war, Gestapo and concentration camp prisoners, soldiers of the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS, forced laborers, displaced persons and German civilians, as well as seven children of forced laborers. There are also 13 dead from the First World War buried here. The dead were reburied in the Arnsburg monastery ruins by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. (German War Graves Commission). Previously, they were buried in cemeteries in the region, mostly in the places where they died. The Federal Republic of Germany guarantees war dead perpetual rest and grave care from public funds. Soon after 1945, however, this no longer seemed guaranteed for many of the scattered war graves. For this reason, collective cemeteries such as the one in Arnsburg were established. The local authorities on whose territory the gravesites are located are responsible for maintaining them. Created as places of mourning and remembrance, the collective cemeteries are also places where sharp contrasts remain tangible. The dead buried there all lost their lives in wars, but many were also victims of Nazi rule. Where SS men are buried next to concentration camp prisoners, the sentence that all people are equal in death loses its reconciling power. The dead of Arnsburg include 87 men and women who were shot by an SS commando near Hirzenhain in the Vogelsberg (graves 291-339, 347-384). With the exception of Emilie Schmitz from Luxembourg (grave 320), no names can be assigned to them. This is the reason why they were buried as "unknown war dead" after the reburial. It was no longer possible to tell from their Arnsburg graves that they were victims of a Nazi crime. The outdated burial plan in the passageway to the war cemetery documents this situation to this day. In the 1980s, the treatment of the Hirzenhain dead came under increasing criticism. Their true fate had been suppressed. After years of protests from the public, the Volksbund realized that the misleading grave plaques had to be replaced. Since 1996, Arnsburg has also been commemorating who the "unknown war dead" actually were: Prisoners of the Nazi regime, murdered on March 26, 1945, four days before US troops reached Hirzenhain. Also since 1996, two information boards at the edge of the cemetery have been dedicated to the memory of the Hirzenhain dead. They tell the story of the crime and document a list of prisoners, through which at least the names of some of the victims have been handed down. Today, the Volksbund in Hesse sees war cemeteries as places of historical and political education. One of the ways in which it tackles the task of coming to terms with what happened is by reconstructing exemplary fates of war dead and making them accessible to the public. You can find out more about the fate of Emilie Schmitz, for example, on a stele at her grave. We also invite you to follow the stories of other dead on the cemetery. There is a new information board with a map at the entrance to the cemetery. The graves where stelae have been erected are marked with red dots. The biographical sketches have been reconstructed from currently available sources and can be added to if new information becomes available. Where the names or gender of the dead are incorrectly stated on the graves, this has been corrected on the steles where possible. The information presented was compiled in 2017 and 2018 as part of the research project on the history of war cemeteries in Hesse, which was launched by the Volksbund in Hesse in 1999. Some of the 87 people murdered in Hirzenhain had previously been imprisoned in the "labor education camp" or "extended women's prison" of the Frankfurt Gestapo, which was attached to the Breuer-Werke, an armaments factory. Other women imprisoned by the Gestapo were transferred from the Frankfurt police prison to Hirzenhain on March 23, 1945 as the US Army approached. Under the pretext of being released, they were marched on March 26 and shot in a pit a short distance from the camp. In May 1945, 87 bodies were recovered from the mass grave and buried first in the Hirzenhain cemetery and then, on the orders of the American military government, in a memorial site set up centrally in the town. in 1947, the sister of one of the victims succeeded in identifying the perpetrators from the SS and Gestapo. The commander of the shooting pit, SS-Hauptscharführer Emil Fritsch, was the only one of those involved to be brought to trial in 1951 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1959. The first plaque commemorating the victims of Hirzenhain, which was erected in Arnsburg Monastery in 1996, gave a ratio of 81 women to six men for those murdered. This ratio was also used by the Giessen district court when it sentenced the commander of the shooting pit to life imprisonment in 1951. Since then, almost all sources of information have quoted these figures. Although an eyewitness testified a few days after the shooting pit was opened that there were "10-15" male corpses in it, another witness was believed in the preliminary proceedings, who only remembered six men two years later. However, when the relevant historical documents were evaluated again in 2017 as part of the Volksbund's research project in Hesse, it emerged that 76 women and eleven men had actually been shot. The text on the memorial plaques from 1996 was therefore revised and supplemented. Since 2019, two new glass plaques have replaced the old ones, which had also aged considerably due to the weather. A stele at the grave of one of the murdered men also addresses the issue of the numerical ratio. It names the origin of the incorrect number and describes how it became established in historical tradition.