Idstein-Kalmenhof

From October 1942 until the end of the war, several hundred victims of Nazi "euthanasia" were buried on the hillside below the Schöne Aussicht road. The dead were children, adolescents and adults who were murdered in the Kalmenhof, a "sanatorium and nursing home", through deliberate neglect or medication. In order to deceive relatives and the public about the murders, a burial ground was laid out for the victims, which was intended to have the appearance of an ordinary institutional cemetery. It was located behind the former Kalmenhof Hospital, which was misused by the perpetrators as a killing site under the cover term "children's ward&quot. The gravesites were marked with license plates to give the impression of individual graves. In reality, however, many of the graves were occupied by several dead. The license plates, which were still visible in the early 1950s, were later removed. One part of the site became overgrown, while another was heavily altered by construction work. The exact location of the cemetery and its extent have been forgotten. The slope below the Schöne Aussicht is divided into steps. In 1982, the Landeswohlfahrtsverband arranged for a trial excavation by the Volksbund on a step in the middle of the slope. According to the recollection of a former resident of the Kalmenhof, who had been forced to bury the murdered, graves were supposed to be located here. The bones of two children were indeed discovered during the excavation at a depth of 1.40 m. The investigated slope was thus proven to be part of the cemetery at the Kalmenhof hospital and was declared a war cemetery. a memorial to the victims was dedicated here in 1987. No attempt was made to determine the total size of the cemetery. However, information from contemporary witnesses suggests that the cemetery extended over other areas of the hillside. The area of the war cemetery is also too small to accommodate the historically attested number of around 280 graves marked with license plates. A research project commissioned by Vitos Rheingau, the current operating company of Kalmenhof, was completed in 2018 with the assumption that further &quotEuthanasia&quot victims were buried in the hillside area above the war cemetery. In July 2019, a georadar investigation revealed numerous anomalies in the subsoil of the areas in question, which could be interpreted as traces of interventions in the ground, for example during the construction of graves. However, the question was not clarified until the excavations in summer 2020, when no traces of further burials were found outside the war cemetery despite an intensive search. The anomalies detected during the georadar survey proved to be natural structures in the rocky ground of the site. Further excavations are planned for 2021 at the edges of the cemetery itself, the overall extent of which is to be finally determined.