Oerbke Prisoner of War Cemetery in Bad Fallingbostel, Lower Saxony

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Get directions Bad Fallingbostel, Lower Saxony, Germany

Coordinates: 52.86135, 9.72884
www.volksbund.de/kriegsgraeberstaette/osterheide-oerbke-sowjetischer-kriegsgefangenenfriedhof.html
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26 open photo requests.

World War II Prisoner of War cemetery in the Oerbke section of Bad Fallingbostel, also called "Friedhof der Namenslosen" (Cemetery of the Nameless). There were two POW camps in this area, Stalag XI-B in Fallingbostel and Stalag XI-D/321 in Oerbke. This cemetery contains the remains of approximately 30,000 Soviet POWs, mostly buried in mass graves, and 232 soldiers from various nations buried in single graves with markers, all of whom died between 1940 and 1945 in both camps.

Today students of the secondary school in Bad Fallingbostel are introduced to the history of the camp and once a year they visit the cemetery to clean the headstones. And there also is a yearly "March of Remembrance" where participants follow the same route to the former camp as the exhausted Soviet prisoners took, and the 10th grade students each bring a clay plate bearing one victim's name and dates. At the cemetery all the names are read aloud and the plates are attached to columns at the lower end of the cemetery - as a symbolic way to give names to the nameless and restore their dignity. (From an information stand at the cemetery.)

On footpath in woods ca. 1 mile (1.5 km) NE of Vogteistr. and Queens Ave., alongside the A7 autobahn