Kriegsgräberstätte Rheinbach

Cemetery description

The War Graves Cemetery in Rheinbach is the final resting place for 553 victims of World War II. Among these, 473 persons were German soldiers who died in the local lazarets (field hospitals), 44 were German civilian victims (including children), and 36 were foreign forced labourers who died while performing their forced labour. These were, above all, citizens of the USSR and Poland who were killed or died as a result of disease, exhaustion or in air bombardments. The site is marked by stone crosses with between ten and twenty first and last names of the deceased inscribed upon them, at least 8 of whom were Polish citizens.
The cemetery was established during the war by local hospital personnel. However, a fire in the city hall in 1945 destroyed all the lists of those buried in the cemetery, and it has been impossible to fully recreate them. What is more, the fire, which broke out just before the end of the war, completely burnt down the cemetery itself. In 1946, the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge) began the clean-up work in the area of the former cemetery. Despite all the difficulties in gaining access to the source materials, the Commission managed to create a uniform spatial arrangement of the cemetery. The Commission placed wooden crosses in the site (the same for all of the deceased) as the symbol of the common fate of the victims. In 1956, during the renovation work, the wooden crosses were replaced with local greywacke crosses and the tall wooden cross was replaced with a stone 5-metre-high stone cross. This burial site is one of the first war graves cemeteries located in Germany.

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