Kriegsgräberstätte Schlüchtern

Cemetery description

In the centre of the city of Schlüchtern, not far from the Evangelical Church, there is a war cemetery that is the final resting place for 331 victims of both World War I and World War II, including 293 German victims, 38 - foreign and 7 - anonymous. The foreign victims were Polish forced labourers and Soviet prisoners of war, concentration camp prisoners that were shot dead, as well as German civilians who died in air bombings, German Wehrmacht soldiers and members of the Waffen-SS. Among the deceased are also victims of the National Socialist military judiciary system who were executed in the last days of the war.
This war cemetery was established in the early 1960s by the German War Graves Commission (Der Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V), in the area of the former mediaeval cemetery. With time, the remains of war victims from the Gelnhausen, Schlüchtern and Hanau districts were moved to this site. Among these, were 6 unknown Polish prisoners of the kommando (working unit) of the Natzweiler concentration camp in Katzbach, who were employed in Adlerwerke Frankfurt am Main (burial section C, graves Nos. 328-333). The victims were killed during their so-called ‘death march’, and were initially buried in the Dörnigheim cemetery, and then moved to the cemetery in Schlüchtern.

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