The German military cemetery of Galati is located on the grounds of the civilian cemetery "Eternitatea".
Description of the cemetery
In 1991, concrete crosses with metal plaques bearing the names, dates and ranks of the dead were erected on the two lawns. The names of those who were buried in the "Osuar" (ossuary), which was later leveled, or whose graves were overburied, are engraved in alphabetical order on metal plaques and assigned to the high cross on the cemetery wall. The name book is located at the cemetery administration (front building on the right).
Burial
In Galati, 98 German dead from the First World War found their final resting place in an "Osuar" (ossuary). A further 1,664 German soldiers were buried in individual graves and also in the "Osuar" during the Second World War. The ossuary was leveled.
History
As early as 1966, youth organizations have been maintaining soldiers' graves at various locations in Romania for years on work assignments. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Volksbund negotiated with Romanian government authorities and various municipal administrations and succeeded in having cemeteries repaired or newly created at several locations. This was followed by the reburial of the dead from both world wars.
In Galati, during expansion work in 1986, the German dead of the Second World War were reburied in a cemetery that had been approved for additional burials. This prevented further overburial by civilian graves, which had already begun in some areas.
The German-Romanian War Graves Agreement came into force on December 10, 1997. The contractual partner of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. is the Romanian "Government Office for the Veneration of Heroes" ("Oficiului Naþional pentru Cultul Eroilor") in Bucharest.
Soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain - from 1999 - the number of work camps organized by the German War Graves Commission in Romania for young people and work assignments for German soldiers, who volunteered to carry out repair and maintenance work on war gravesites, increased. The Romanian Ministry of Defense and the central and local authorities supported these activities. The Romanian military took part in the maintenance work, accommodated the groups at its bases and fed them there.
Special feature
The cemetery is also home to Romanian and German soldiers who died in the First World War in a joint ossuary, French soldiers from the First World War in a small burial ground and Romanian and Soviet soldiers who died in the Second World War in two other burial grounds.
The war cemetery department (telephone: +49 561 7009-179) can provide information on how to visit the cemetery.
