Bensheim-Auerbach

This text is a result of the research project "On the historical reappraisal of selected war cemeteries in Hesse": http://www.volksbund.de/hessen/projekte0/forschungsprojekt0.html A total of 1961 dead from the Second World War - 1385 Germans and 576 foreigners - were buried here. In addition to German Wehrmacht soldiers, members of the Waffen SS and bombing victims, prisoners of war and forced labourers from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe also found their final resting place here. As many of the deported foreigners died after the end of the war as a result of the privation they had previously suffered, the dates of death extend into 1946. Origin of the cemetery In April 1945, various cemeteries were laid out by the American armed forces. The soldiers of different nationalities had fallen in the combat zones around Ludwigshafen, Würzburg, Nuremberg and Heilbronn. In the first years after the war, numerous Western European war dead were repatriated to their home countries. However, the cemetery section for the Eastern European and German war dead was retained. At the end of the 1950s, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V. (German War Graves Commission) merged the remaining cemeteries. The war cemetery was dedicated on September 29, 1957. Fallen as the "last contingent" Many of the German soldiers buried here died in mid-April 1945 during the fighting in the Heilbronn area. Some of them were barely adults, just 17 or 18 years old. The young people had been pulled out of their training and regular troops as a "last stand" in order to prevent the imminent breakthrough of the American army into southern Germany together with other units. Even after the end of the fighting, an uncertain fate initially awaited many soldiers. At the end of March 1945, a serious accident occurred on the way to the prisoner of war camps on the left bank of the Rhine: a makeshift ferry carrying around 150 German prisoners of war was accidentally capsized by an approaching speedboat. Around 20 men are said to have saved themselves by swimming - while all the others drowned. Some of the victims are buried at the Bensheim war cemetery. Starved to death as German prisoners of war There is a mass grave in the northern part of the cemetery: 385 Soviet prisoners of war who died in the Heppenheim sanatorium and nursing home, which served as a military hospital, have found their final resting place here. The high mortality rate can be traced back to a partly circumstance-related, partly deliberate neglect of nutrition and medical care for these people.