Sandbostel, Friedhof von Opfern der Gewaltherrschaft

The Sandbostel camp: In September 1939, several thousand Poles were the first prisoners of war to arrive at the Sandbostel camp, located south of Bremervörde in a remote moorland area between the Elbe and Weser rivers. This camp, known as Stalag X B (Mannschafts-Stammlager B in Wehrkreis X, Hamburg), housed several hundred thousand people from large parts of the world until its liberation in April 1945: prisoners of war, mainly from the Soviet Union, France, Poland, Yugoslavia and Great Britain, Italian military internees, members of the British merchant navy, participants in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and, finally, around 10,000 concentration camp prisoners. Some prisoners only stayed in the camp for a few days, others for several years. The prisoners of war were used in numerous places in the North German war economy. Mass deaths due to hunger, epidemics, exhaustion and violence occurred among the Soviet prisoners of war in the fall and winter of 1941/42 and among the concentration camp prisoners deported to Sandbostel in April/May 1945. The camp's dead are buried in the cemetery located around two kilometers east of the camp. Their number has not yet been conclusively determined. The latest estimates vary between 8,000 and 50,000 dead. After the liberation by British troops, they burned down several areas of the camp in May 1945 due to a typhus epidemic. From June 1945 to 1948, several thousand SS and Nazi leaders were interned in Sandbostel. From 1952 to 1960, the buildings that still existed at the time were used as a transit camp for young GDR refugees. in 1974, the parts of the camp site that had not yet been converted back into farmland were declared an "Immenhain industrial estate". The 25 buildings of Stalag X B, at least the basic structures of which have been preserved to this day, have been listed as historical monuments since 1992 (with a few exceptions). the "Sandbostel Camp Foundation" was established in 2005. The organization's mission is to establish a memorial and meeting place on the former camp grounds. The cemetery: In the summer of 1945, the Soviet military administration had a memorial erected in the Sandbostel cemetery for the Red Army soldiers buried there. in 1949, the entire cemetery was leveled and dug up. The 53 rows of Soviet mass graves were then combined above ground in a much smaller area to form (today 14) "collective graves"; the grave layout therefore does not correspond in part to the actual location of the dead. in 1956, the Soviet memorial was torn down at the instigation of the district of Bremervörde and the Lower Saxony Ministry of the Interior, partly because of the allegedly excessive number of dead noted on it. The trilingual inscription on the Soviet memorial read: "Here rest 46,000 Russian soldiers and officers, tortured to death in Nazi captivity". in 1956, as part of the first major redesign of the cemetery, the reburial of almost 3,000 concentration camp prisoners from mass graves in the region was also largely completed. Most of the remains of Western European prisoners of war were transferred to their home countries, those of the Italians to the central cemetery in Hamburg-Öjendorf. The cemetery as it is today Left part of the cemetery: - 4 collective graves with Soviet prisoners of war. The dead rest beneath the surface, which was redesigned in the post-war period, in 70 rows of mass graves. Their exact number is still unknown. Estimates range from 8000 - 50000 dead. - approx. 100 individual graves of Yugoslav and unknown prisoners of war; right-hand section of the cemetery: - approx. 70 individual graves of Polish and unknown prisoners of war; - 2.397 individual graves of unidentifiable concentration camp prisoners reburied from the camp area in 1954 - 56 by the French burial service; - 41 unidentified concentration camp prisoners from an evacuation transport from Neuengamme reburied from a mass grave near Brokel in 1963 The national veterans' associations of prisoners of war and the organizations of surviving concentration camp prisoners, such as the Amicale Internationale de Neuengamme, worked after the war to ensure that the history of Stalag X B was not forgotten and that the graves of the dead of Sandbostel were kept in a dignified condition. The state of Lower Saxony had been responsible for their care since 1946; since 1973, the cemetery has been looked after by the municipality of Sandbostel on behalf of the state. Photos: Volker Fleig 2013