Aschersleben

The cemetery of honor for the fallen of the 1st and 2nd World Wars contains the graves of 158 German war victims of the 1st World War who died between 1914 and 1922. Following a resolution passed by the town council on November 12, 1915, work began on a cemetery of honor for soldiers who died in the Great War at the municipal cemetery in Schmidtmannstraße. The work on the cemetery of honor took several years and was only completed after the end of the war. Once the ground plan of the cemetery had been completed, the inscribed gravestones were placed in 1917. After 1939, the cemetery of honor was expanded to include the graves of the fallen from the Second World War. A total of 196 German soldiers from both world wars who died or lost their lives as a result of the fighting are buried in this cemetery of honor. Five Red Army soldiers and 139 Soviet forced laborers, including 42 children, rest in a memorial grove at the entrance to the cemetery. Also buried here are 68 civilians deported from Belgium, France, Italy, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, who were deployed at the Junkers factories mentioned above, as well as 21 Poles who were reburied from the surrounding area. At the instigation of the Soviet military command, a work by the sculptor Rudolf Herbst was dedicated here. There is also a memorial in the cemetery for the dead opponents of National Socialism from Aschersleben and for six unknown concentration camp prisoners who were part of an evacuation march, who were shot on the cemetery grounds on April 13, 1945 and buried here. It was redesigned in 1974. A special feature of the cemetery in Aschersleben is that the burial plots are marked with QR codes. This gives visitors the opportunity to find out more information about the war graves directly on site without the large information boards detracting from the aesthetics of the graves. Source: S. Endlich and N. Goldenbogen, Memorials to the Victims of National Socialism, Volume II. Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 1999. Ministry of the Interior and Sport of Saxony-Anhalt, Die Gräber erhalten, den Frieden bewahren. Graves for the victims of the First World War on the territory of present-day Saxony-Anhalt, Magdeburg 2014.