Murderous Comradeship
SOLOGUBOWKA The activities of the ,,Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge"(National League for the Preservation of German War Graves), which is in charge of ,,memorializing the (German) dead"of both world wars, continue to generate criticism and opposition. These are currently directed against the establishment of a memorial site in Russia's Sologubowka, where all German aggressors killed in action or missing in action are to be remembered as ,,victims".
The National League for the Preservation of German War Graves, inspired by the state and subsidized with millions, has been reproached repeatedly for diminishing German war crimes and for putting the victims of German aggression on equal footing with the perpetrators. The current activities of the association in East and Southeast Europe meet with opposition because they are viewed as justification for past occupation and indicate new intentions for expansion.
Perpetrators...
During WW II, Sologubowka had been the scene of the German army's campaign of annihilation. Located seventy kilometers in front of the former Leningrad, the community became the center of the German army's deadly blockade which surrounded the city and resulted in approximately one million Soviet civilians becoming victims. The Russian orthodox church which was restored with German funds, now serves the National League for the Preservation of German War Graves as a memorial to the perpetrators. Then, the church had served, among other things, as a prison for Russian prisoners of war. More than half of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war were shot, starved or died as the result of inhuman forced labor.
Today, the church serves as an addition to the German military cemetery of Sologubowka, which had been dedicated in the year 2000, where already 32,000 members of the German occupation force have been buried. With a future capacity for 80,000 burials, it is to become the most extensive German military cemetery in the world. The church already houses volumes containing the names of 800,000 German aggressors who perished on the soil of the present Russia. There, unique for all of Russia, a memorial and exhibition room, documenting the names of all German war dead, is planned.
... named victims
Criticism was directed particularly against the memorial tablets which had been placed in the church and which put the dead perpetrators on an equal footing with their victims, thus considering them victims as well. The intention to do so was emphatically confirmed by a representative of the National League for the Preservation of German War Graves. According to German interpretations all of them are considered ,,victims": the attacked and the occupiers, the murdered Soviet civilians and the prisoners of war, the soldiers and the strapping Nazis of the Waffen-SS. The church's priest, who is, otherwise, kindly disposed toward the request of the National League for the Preservation of German War Graves, expressed misgivings against the arrangement of the crypt and tablets but was brusquely reprimanded by the German organizers: ,,They said I should not interfere."
Notwithstanding all criticism, the church, dedicated to the memory of the murderers, was recently opened in the presence of the German Ambassador. Hundreds of attending veterans of the German annihilation campaign were treated to the performance by Hamburg's police orchestra of ,,Ich hatt' einen Kameraden"( ,,I had a comrade", a popular military song). 1)
1) See also Christian Streit: Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945
Sources:
Einzigartiger Ort des Gedenkens; www.volksbund.de 10.09.2003
Grober Monolith. Provokation schon vor der Eroeffnung - der deutsche Soldatenfriedhof in Sologubowka; Sueddeutsche Zeitung 20.09.2003
Restaurierte Kirche bei deutschem Soldatenfriedhof eingeweiht; AP 20.09.2003