The Bensheim-Auerbach cemetery is one of the largest war cemeteries in Hessen. Established in April 1945, by order of the occupying American authorities, the site served as the final resting place for soldiers who fell in battle. After the war, most of the victims from Western Europe were exhumed and transferred to their homelands.
In the 1950s, the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e.V.) consolidated the remaining graves and rearranged the cemetery. At present, the central part is marked by a large basalt cross and the graves have stone plaques that bear the victims’ personal data. The inauguration of the newly-arranged cemetery took place on 29 September 1957. The burial site houses the graves of 1,961 victims of World War II, including 576 foreign citizens (Soviet prisoners of war and forced labourers from Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and Hungary) as well as 1,385 German soldiers, SS-men and civilians.
Approximately 400 graves of foreign victims were moved to this site from the Heppenheim cemetery. Among the civilian victims of World War II that rest here are 95 Polish citizens. However, not all the headstones bear their names.
Cemetery address: Bensheim, Hesse
Auerbach, Saarstrasse
64625 Bensheim
GPS: 49.692679,8.598775
Cemetery administration: Stadtverwaltung Bensheim,
www.bensheim.de/,
info@bensheim.de,
Kirchbergstraße 18, 64625 Bensheim,
+49 6251 14-0
