post your Graves photos

[joeimwalle]

winter shot of pic #6

winter shot of pic #6
same pic as above but in winter

[joeimwalle]

----winter shot of pic #6

winter shot of pic #6

[joeimwalle]

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[mbberlin]

Who was responsible for the removal of German soldier's remains to official war cemetaties during the war years? Were there official German military war cemetaries during WW2 or were they established after the war?

The "Volksbund Deutscher Kriegsgräberfürsorge" was founded in 1919. Most of the existing war memorials were build in the first years after WW1. But only as memorials, not as cementeries. We had no bigger official cememterys pre 1945.

You can see the small menuments in almost every german little town who had lost men in the war.

http://freenet-homepage.de/denkmaele...gerdenkmal.jpg

In 1933 the Volksbund had no more poilitcal influence and was "dead" till 1945.

Only in the first time during the poland campaign dead soldiers were brought back to germany. They were buried at civil cementeries.

A bit later they had no transport capacities and there was also the problem with epedemic diseases from the rotten corpses. The only way to bring them home was with airtight made zinc-coffins.

Every unit had also a so called Wehrmachts-Gräberoffizier (Offizer for Graves). They had to make sure that corpses had been buried as fast as possible. With the direction to indicate them with full name, date of birth and dead and rank. Bur that wasn't possible anyway.

Sometimes you can see graves without corpses from WW2, with the advice "In fremder Erde" (in foreign earth).

Most of the Kriegsgräberstätten in Germany are post war and sometimes anomoumus deads near to former battle fields like Halbe. The central cemetry Halbe for example was builded in the 50ths, when the Kriegsgräberfürsorge started to consolidate a lot of small war time cemeteries in the whole area.

A lot of them couldn't be identified because the Red Army had the direction to remove ID tags and ID papers.

Same procedur in northrn afrika. Most of the small cementaries have been erased and the remains were brought to central cemeteries.

Today Kriegsgräberfürsorge is very active in Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine.

[mbberlin]

I think this is a very nice one!

Do you know what is says?

"Hier ruht unsere Hoffnung, der Urlaub!"

It means "Here rests our hope, vacation!" :-)

[mbberlin]

Thank you all for sharing with us these great photos!

Graeme, about the photo of your cross, I am wondering what happen with all the crosses in German's field cementeries?? they were removed by the goverments after the war or just destroyed by the local people ??

In Germany they had be denazified by order of allied officials.

In Russia they have removed all crosses and tombstones easily. They didn't wanted to have any german memories...

This is also a reason that a lot of german cementaries are still hard to find over there.

[Paladin]

[pimpf]

Some early FJ grave and burial ceremony photos. Small monument - tribute to fallen comrades at Moerdjik.

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[pimpf]

Again FJ photo but from earlier period than above, Wola-Gulowska.