Thoughts on war: The Prisoner of War cemetery in Kameshkovo/Russia (Published on 14/06/2023, updated on 17/06/2023)
In addition to letters from the war and immediate post-war period, literature sources from the time also provide a vivid impression of what war means for people and what a high price all soldiers and their families have to pay in war – mostly in complete contrast to those who have politically fomented and initiated it. It is of central importance to keep alive the memory of the times of war and its consequences in order to prevent the same mechanisms from being set in motion once again and history from repeating itself with ever more fatal consequences.
On 17/08/1952, standing at the graves of the dead buried in the military cemetery in Hürtgen, the then German Federal President Theodor Heuss formulated the importance of war commemoration in his speech at the opening of this cemetery as follows (translated from German language):
“They were human beings like us. But at these crosses we hear their voices: ‘Take care, you who are still in life, that peace may remain, peace among men, peace among nations.’”
To this end, under the title “Thoughts on War”, excerpts from literature describing war and its consequences for those involved will be reproduced here as a reminder of what war means to man and mankind. To provide food for thought and in the unshakable hope that this may make a difference.
The publications of Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (“Volksbund”, the German War Graves Commission) up to around 2010 are well worth reading. The reports and short stories published in them often provide a catchy description of the situation in the post-war period and of the emotional world of the people at that time, who were absolutely united on one issue: No more war!
A good example is the following contribution on the POW cemetery in Kameshkovo/Russia from the volume “Erzählen ist Erinnern” published by Volksbund in 1999, p. 168 ff. (translation from German language):
Cemetery of the defeated
by
Viktor Wekipelow
“Behind the town of Kamezhkovo, located in the Vladimir region – behind the low facilities of the municipal vegetable depot and the cattle farm septic tank, in the pure, never withering pine forest – for many years rose a three-meter-high wooden fence, blackened over the years. Tightly gouged and mysterious, without a single gate or loophole; such fences usually surround pits for animal carcasses, all sorts of flocks of contagion, plague and foot-and-mouth disease. The passers-by gave him a wide berth, and the old berry-pickers crossed themselves hastily.
Behind the impermeable fence hid a cemetery of German prisoners of war, soldiers of the Second World War, who had died of wounds and diseases far from their homeland, in this strange Russian, wooden-built town, which they surely had not even seen in their dreams. During the war and for several years after its end, there was a hospital for German prisoners of war in Kamezhkovo. The hospital was located in the two buildings where the municipal schools No. 2 and 3 are now located. The sick Germans were brought to Kamezhkovo by rail, in red freight cars. According to eyewitnesses, they were loaded into the wagons standing up and crowded together in such a way that people fell out of the wagons when the doors were opened – living people and those who had died on the way, all one big mess.
The treatment in the hospital was lousy, there was a lack of personnel and medicines, the food was camp fare, and the people died like flies, most of them not even from diseases, but rather from hunger, unhygienic conditions, but mostly from lack of care and isolation. And what kind of treatment could there really be, since for the hospital staff only ‘fascists’ and ‘Fritzes’ lay here, they could not only be left without real care, they were allowed to kick them on top of it. According to eyewitnesses, the corpses in their underwear – and sometimes without it – were piled in a heap on a horse-drawn cart, and a deaf, silent wagoner took them behind the town, to the cemetery in the woods. The Germans themselves provided the gravediggers, recruited from convalescents and orderlies. With German thoroughness, each grave was enclosed with hewn stones; they were not allowed to carve a name or place a cross on it, only at the top, at the head end, the registration number was brushed on.
When the cemetery was finally surrounded by a dense board fence and after the dissolution of the hospital even the gate was firmly closed, any access had become impossible. The years passed. During all the time that the cemetery was fenced, the graves were still somehow preserved: the numbers were renewed, the small mounds and the stone borders were not destroyed. The graves were densely overgrown with grass, with the leathery leaves of the cranberry, already here and there young pines and birches had grown. The cemetery gradually merged with the forest, dissolved into it.
I first visited this German forest cemetery in the summer of 1973. The fence was still standing then, although a piece had fallen out, partially exposing the cemetery to the view from outside. A somewhat eerie sense of neglect and injustice wafted toward me as I climbed through that breach. I didn’t know what a camp cemetery was then, but this was one: regular squares with numbers, what a camp barracks looks like when the prisoners have gone to work. I counted 460 graves, 19 of them mass graves. Why mass graves? Were there epidemics? In the grass under the fence I discover an upturned heavy stone, pushed from one of the graves, in which ‘Rudi Mayer, 1908 – 1946’ was chiseled.
Who had placed this stone? Had someone from the homeland actually found his way here? It was probable that they had not found the exact grave and had placed the stone at random, and now someone, who was completely indifferent to all this, had simply pushed it down into the undergrowth by the fence. I saw another stone on one of the graves, but that was all: ‘Dr. Richard Spieler, 1914 – 1946’.
I remember that even then I asked myself the question: Why? Why are dead victors buried under marble slabs on which their names are carved in gold letters? Why are the defeated like the stepchildren of the earth, like vagabonds picked up by the roadside, like contagious animals – hidden behind a thick fence, without graves or names, in scattered pits in the forest? Well, they were strangers, aggressors, invaders, enemies … But they came to this distant settlement already without weapons in their hands. They died of wounds and hunger, from suppurators, in a foreign region where one ruler had hurled them and where another, although already defeated and in captivity, humiliated them and did hardly anything to heal and feed them. And anyway: in death there are no pure and impure, in it there can be no nations, no classes, no aggressors, no enemies.
It is the ultimate right of everyone to be buried with dignity, even as a rebel, a criminal, a slave and an outcast – is it not also one of these rights? And certainly soldiers of all armies, even if they have fallen on foreign soil and with weapons in their hands, must receive this right. They are all equally deserving of remembrance, respect and pity, for they were all only fulfilling the will of their governments. These soldiers must not be trampled underfoot because of the guilt of their governments. It was not until five years later, in 1978, that I visited this German cemetery again. My God, what a terrible sight was there! There was not a plank left of that wooden fence. And that place was no longer only the scene of neglect and dissolution, but of reviling and looting.
From many graves the stone border had been removed – that modest border, which the hands of the compatriots, who perhaps a week later had themselves been buried one row further, had so carefully laid. Those stones had now been broken out by thieves’ hands, and here and there black, fresh wounds gaped in the earth. Some graves, including a mass grave, were also half-excavated; who might the grave robbers be and what had they been looking for here? Even the forest has already given way to the pressure of the suburb. The cemetery is trampled and polluted by cows (now they are carried out from the animal farms to the pastures right here), it is overgrown with weeds and scrub and has become a garbage dump: rusted tin cans, broken glass, some rotten rags.
The population shows differing attitudes towards the fate of these unfortunates lying in the forest near Kamezhkovo: ‘They are fascists! Serves them right! They killed, they plundered!’ And yet I believe that my silent people in their majority do not judge the defeated. They may keep silent, turn away and look away, but inwardly they are filled with shame. They understand, have compassion and at least in this they differ from the cruel and indifferent state power, which threw not only enemies but also millions of its own citizens into the Siberian nameless pits of the Gulag.
After I had taken some pictures, I walked once again, with a heavy heart, along all these sad, nameless grave mounds. Who were these people, nameless, except for Rudi Mayer and Dr. Spieler? What were their names, what had they looked like, who loved them and was waiting for them? For they all had survivors somewhere: mothers, wives, fiancées, who are perhaps still unconsoled and praying for them, who would perhaps give much for a word, for the answer to the ‘Where?’. But they are here – shrouded by a distant forest near Vladimir, under a thirty-year silence, outcast and reviled.”
The POW cemetery in Kamezhkovo/Russia was restored in 1995; according to Volksbund “about 1,611 dead” rest there.
(Head picture: Two of numerous smashed gravestones on the
military cemetery Bitburg-Kolmeshöhe, September 2022)
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