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- 22 08 2003 - 20:31 - katatonik

German cemeteries abroad

“Some 70 km southeast of St. Petersburg on 12 acres on the fringes of the village, Sologubovka is the biggest German war cemetery anywhere, including in Germany itself.

Its opening marked the climax to a German quest to locate and rebury the fallen soldiers of the Third Reich all across Russia and Eastern Europe in the nine years since the collapse of communism.

“We’ve got projects like this in Poland, in the Baltic states, in the Czech republic, in Slovakia, in Hungary. All over the former Warsaw Pact in the countries where we couldn’t work until 1990,” said Fritz Kirchmeier of the People’s Union for Care of War Graves, based in Kassel.

German researchers and forensic experts have been working systematically across the former communist bloc throughout the 1990s. An estimated 4 million German military personnel died between Berlin and Moscow in the war, just over half in what was the Soviet Union. Almost all the German war dead lay neglected for the duration of the Cold War, the sites virtually unknown.

So far 250,000 German war dead have been exhumed from unmarked graves and reburied. A German war cemetery was opened in the Polish port of Gdansk a couple of weeks ago, yet another in the Slovak capital, Bratislava in July.

They are among scores of such projects in a race against time to locate the dead. “The relatives of the dead are getting very old, and the eye witnesses who can tell us where the corpses were buried are also very old, so we have to speed up our work. We reckon we’ve got another five years,” Kirchmeier said. “

Final resting place for German war dead, Ian Traynor / The Guardian, 23 September 2000.


My husband father was an SS Officer in charge of the caserne in Bratislava. The family left Bratislava on April 1st 1945 and never heard again from their father. In hoping that you can help us to find some information even the archives in Berlin cannot find trace of him. His name was Karl Ammer.Even today we still hope to find some informations.
Thanking you in advance

Sylvie Martel (Jun 28, 09:08 pm) #

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