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Ehrenhain Zeithain
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Gedenkstätte Bautzen
 
German Army and Soviet POW's
Founding of the Camp
"Zeithain Russian Camp"
POW Hospital Zeithain
Italian Military Prisoners
Poles and Other Prisoners
Remembrance 1945-1985
History of the Memorial
 
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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.

Opening ceremony Ehrenhain
Zeithain, 1946
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