Remembrance, 1945-1985
The end of the Second World War did not bring an end to the suffering of the
Soviet prisoners of war. In Stalin's eyes they had violated Order No. 270
of August 16, 1941: prisoners of war were considered the same as "traitorous
deserters", regardless of whether they had resisted or collaborated with
the enemy. After their liberation, they were interrogated in "filtration
camps", and many of them were sentenced to long terms in the Gulag. Those
who survived were only released after Stalin's death. For the rest of their
lives, the former prisoners were subjected to discrimination in their occupations
and in their daily lives. They were only fully rehabilitated in Russia in
1995, by an edict issued by President Boris Yeltsin in connection with the
50th anniversary of the end of the war.
On August 1, 1946, the head of the Soviet Military Administration in Saxony,
General Mikhail Katukov, issued Order 233, "Investigation of the Atrocities
Committed Against Soviet Prisoners of War in Stalag 304, Zeithain". The
investigating commission, headed by the Soviet Major-General Khorun, consisted
of Soviet officers, GDR People's Police officers and German coroners. The
mass graves in the four Zeithain cemeteries were examined and some of the
gravesites laid open. Former Nazi party members were forced to do this work.
The primary objective of the investigation was to determine the causes of
death, since it was suspected that mass shootings had taken place. This suspicion
was not confirmed, however: the investigation established beyond a doubt that
the high death toll had been caused by hunger and disease.
The commission found some 35,000 dead Soviet prisoners of war in the opened
graves. Until the early 1990s, official figures mentioned 140,000 dead. Researchers
were unable to confirm this number, however. The figure of 140,000 victims
must be attributed to propaganda, since it was first cited on June 25, 1946--weeks
before the actual investigation began--in an article in the Sächsische
Zeitung titled "Zeithain's Forest of the Dead". The East German
authorities made no attempt to verify the claim, but continued to cite it
as the official number of victims.
After the Soviet commission had completed its investigations, the four cemeteries
were renovated at the expense of the civil government of the Oschatz and Grossenhain
districts. The Zeithain Memorial Grove was established at the site of the
mass graves used in 1941, in the immediate vicinity of the "Zeithain
Russian Cemetery" beside the Riesa-Gröditz railway line. The other
three cemeteries were located in the Zeithain military training ground and
were not accessible to the public until the mid-1990s, when parts of the area
were released from military use. For this reason, public commemoration has
focused on the Zeithain Memorial Grove.
Individual remembrance of the victims was not considered desirable, and indeed
it was made impossible since the names of the dead that were known in 1945-46
were purposely not recorded when the cemeteries were laid out. The anonymization
of the victims was a further expression of the ostracism of Soviet prisoners
of war at home, where the political leadership denied them the title conferred
on other veterans, "Heroes of the Great Patriotic War". They were
stigmatized as traitors to the fatherland, and in death barely tolerated as
nameless victims of Fascism.
Of the approximately 900 dead Italian prisoners, 863 were buried in individual
graves in the "Jacobsthal Italian War Cemetery", which was also
situated within the Zeithain military training ground near the village of
Jacobsthal, now part of Zeithain. Beginning in 1944-45, forty-four Poles and
an unknown number of Serbs were also laid to rest here. These graves were
leveled after 1945 by the Red Army, who continued to use the Zeithain military
training ground, and until 1990 they were not accessible to the victims' families.
From the beginning, the non-Soviet prisoners were ignored in public remembrance
of the POW camp victims.
The remains of the Italian prisoners were repatriated by the Italian army
in 1991.