St. Andreas Friedhof

Cemetery description

The St. Andreas’s Roman Catholic Church Cemetery is located in Prozessionsweg. The victims of World War II and the National Socialist Regime are buried in three very well maintained burial sections that can be found in the left back part of the cemetery - 196 persons in total.
One of the sections holds the graves of 103 German soldiers and several Russian prisoners of war from World War I. Most fell in battles against the British troops in Cloppenburg and its neighbourhood more or less on 13 April 1945, or died of the inflicted wounds soon afterwards. However, 8 persons have never been identified.
Another burial section is the final resting place for 64 civilian victims of a heavy Allied air raid on Cloppenburg on 10 April 1945. The site is marked by a monument commemorating the victims. The memorial plaque bears the name of a Polish forced labourer by the name of Eugenius Szimanski, whose exact date and place of interment remain unknown.
Also, it is still unknown whether this grave holds the last remains of the concentration camp prisoners from the evacuation train from Versen and Dalum who died in the air raid on the railway station in Cloppenburg on 26 March 1945.
The Polish War Graves Cemetery is located to the left of the burial site for the air raids victims. The graves hold the last remains of 14 soldiers of the 1st Polish Armoured Division, 3 shot down Polish RAF pilots, 1 soldier from an unknown military unit who fell in battle in April 1945 or later, and 11 Polish forced labourers, most of whom died after the end of the war. The crosses on the graves of the soldiers from the 1st Polish Armoured Division are marked by the Division’s Emblem, while the graves of the Polish RAF pilots - by the Polish National Emblem. At the entrance to this cemetery, there is a stone information board displaying some information in Polish and German

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