Bielefeld-Buschkamp, Senne I-Kriegsgräberstätte

Buschkamp Cemetery of Honour The name Buschkamp, in the municipality of Senne I, comes from an old farming family who ran a farm here for centuries. In the first days of April 1945, American tanks entered the municipality. On April 4, a small unit of colored American soldiers led by a white officer followed. They seized and occupied the Buschkamp School and surrounding houses. This unit had the task of establishing a cemetery for the German soldiers who had fallen in Westphalia or died in military hospitals. On April 12, the Americans marked out the cemetery site in a rye field. The site belonged to the Schillingshof, a workers' colony of the Bethel Institutions in Bielefeld. The burials began the very next day. At first, the population believed that it was American casualties who were being buried. The Americans carried out everything quite secretively. They stretched out large sheets in the schoolyard, behind which the work was carried out. The dead, brought by truck from a radius of over 100 km, were wrapped in linen sheets and buried, and white wooden crosses were placed on the graves. The burials lasted until May 30, 1945. 484 war dead found their final resting place in Buschkamp. Germans were not allowed to enter the school or cemetery grounds. This only changed after the occupation zones in Germany were established. The British were now in charge. From then on, the cemetery was open to everyone, but neither the American nor the British authorities provided the German side with an occupancy list for the cemetery. It is thanks to head teacher Hans Oelker that such a list was drawn up. He had his schoolchildren, who later tended the graves of the fallen with dedication, copy down all the data on the metal plates on the crosses. 484 pieces of paper were sorted and compiled into a list. After a while, the cemetery grounds resembled a desert of sand, with grass and weeds growing on it. At the end of the 1940s, the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, Landesverband Nordrhein-Westfalen, took over the design and development of the cemetery. Master gardener Hoffmann and landscape gardener Fritz Kampmann took on the task. The white wooden crosses were initially replaced by oak crosses and later by weather-resistant stone crosses. In the course of the cemetery expansion, further graves were added, so that today 586 German war dead are buried in Buschkamp. Of the 188 initially unknown war dead, 90 could be identified, 98 remained nameless. In addition to the German dead, Italians, Czechs, Poles and Alsatians who had fought in Wehrmacht units, as well as three women, also found a final resting place. Some relatives from Plettenberg, Sauerland, who were found in the cemetery as Volkssturm soldiers, were not given permission to be repatriated. One day, in the middle of the night, they turned up with trucks and coffins, dug up their dead and buried them in their home cemetery. The empty graves were later used to bury those who had been transferred to Buschkamp. The Buschkamp cemetery of honor was consecrated on August 2, 1952. The dedication speech was given by former State Councillor Ahlhorn, President of the German War Graves Commission. The consecration was performed by Archbishop Dr. Jäger, Paderborn, and President Dr. Wilm, Bielefeld.