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Photo Album

Germany 2008

Germany in May 2008 including Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle, weekend in Munich, Varus battle near Osnabrück and museum village in Cloppenburg.

2008 May 13 17 19 20 22

Bergen-Belsen (111) Cloppenburg Museum Village (225) Concentration Camp (111) Erica (3) Kalkriese (75) Munich (55) Smart (1)

All

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Cobwebs.
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Bricks with names of some of the russian prisoners of war.
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Grave on the cemetery of the Soviet prisoners of war.
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Graves.
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Graves.
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Graves.
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Row of graves on the cemetery of the Soviet prisoners of war.
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Probably by proxy for all those who died here in 1942.
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Row of graves.
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Starting in 1940, a German army hut camp situated at the edge of the Bergen military training area was used to accommodate a work detachment of French and Belgian prisoners of war. In 1941 it was extended to form a camp and field hospital for Soviet prisoners of war (STALAG XI C/311). Between 1941 and 1944 an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Red Army soldiers died in the Bergen-Belsen prisoner-of-war camp due to the totally inadequate living conditions; they died of starvation, froze to death or succumbed to disease. Most of the mass graves in this cemetery were dug in the winter of 1941/42 when, within a few months, 18,000 prisoners died in the camp, which had not even been completed. The single grave of the Polish woman soldier Elzbieta Glazowska is also to be found in the cemetery. As a member of the "Armia Kraiowa" (Home Army) she had participated in the Warsaw Rising in 1944 and died in the Bergen-Belsen field hospital for prisoners of war on January 6th, 1945. Immediately after the end of the war the first measures were undertaken to lay out the cemetery. In the summer of 1946 the Soviet Military Mission had a memorial erected with the inscription in Russian and English: "Here are burried 50,000 Soviet prisoners of war tortured to death in German-Fascist captivity." The addition in Russian on the other side of the memorial is: "Rest in peace, dear comrades - the memory of you will live on for ever in the hearts of the peoples of the Soviet Union." The cemetery was given its present shape during the sixties, when landscaping was undertaken. A commemorative stone was erected by the German side in 1968. The protective bank around the cemetery was constructed by participants from international youth camps.
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Detail of the German text.
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Detail of the russian text.
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Detail of the english text.
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Overview map of the Bergen-Belsen camp. In the top left corner is the cemetery of the soviet prisoners of war.
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Russian memorial.
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German Memorial.
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