Kommunalfriedhof Dössel

Cemetery description

The municipal cemetery in Dössel (a district in Warburg) houses a Polish war graves burial site for 141 prisoners of war, 139 of whom were Polish soldiers kept captive in the Oflag VIB Dössel (Doessel) prisoner-of-war camp for officers.
The camp was established in 1940 and, initially, it was a place of imprisonment for British and French officers. In 1942, a group of Poles were moved here (officers, non-commissioned officers, privates - batmen), mostly from the IVC - Colditz Oflag (prisoner-of-war camp for officers) as well as 1,077 Polish officers handed over to the Germans by the Romanians.
In total, until the liberation of the camp took place, 2,817 Polish Prisoners of War stayed in the Dössel camp. On the night of 27 September 1944, British bombers, aiming at the railway station in Nörde, mistakenly dropped a bomb on the camp, killing 90 persons and injuring 230, including Brigadier General Wiktor Thommée, Colonel Bolesław Borkowski, Colonel Stefan Brzeszczyński and Major Władysław Steblik. In total, 141 prisoners of war were killed in the Dössel camp.
In 2009, the Warburg city board (where Dössel is one of the districts) along with the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V.) ordered that maintenance and renovation work was to be performed in the Polish burial section, which takes up almost a quarter of the area of the whole cemetery. It is now surrounded by a hedgerow and is marked by a monument commemorating all the victims. The individual graves are marked by gravestones with the victims’ names inscribed upon them.

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