The Waldfriedhof Pfaffenwald cemetery is located in a forest between the towns of Beiershausen (part of Bad Harsfeld) and Kirchheim. It is surrounded by a stone wall, and contains the graves of 453 victims of World War II - women and men forced labourers and their children, and prisoners of war - coming mostly from the USSR and Poland.
These people were mostly prisoners of the Pfaffenwald camp established in 1938. It was a camp for forced labourers employed in the construction of a motorway bridge over the Aschbach Valley. As of 1939, to the camp were brought Polish citizens and foreigners deported from the occupied territories in Europe. As of 1942, the Pfaffenwald camp served as a collective and transit camp. Several of the barracks were made into a lazaret (field hospital) for those unable to work and into a birth-labour ward for the female forced labourers. The newborn babies were taken away from their mothers right after their birth. Every year, a few hundred forced abortions were carried out among the forced women labourers.
At first, the dead were buried in a makeshift cemetery nearby the camp. In 1961, the Bundeswehr and Volksbund soldiers created the still-existing war cemetery in the forest, into which the remains of war victims from the local cemeteries and burial sections were moved.
The identified number of the names of Polish citizens buried here amounts to 46 persons, 23 of whom were the IX A Stalag prisoners of war exhumed from the Ziegenhain cemetery. Most probably, the actual number of the victims buried here is higher. Bronze tablets with the identified names of the victims can be seen on the wall surrounding the cemetery. There are also several stone crosses and gravestones within the cemetery.
