Zeithain Memorial Grove

Gedenkstätte Ehrenhain Zeithain

The Zeithain Memorial Grove was established in the Saxon town of Zeithain, near Riesa, in 1949. It commemorates the tens of thousands of prisoners of war who were held at Stalag 304 (IV H) Zeithain between 1941 and 1945.

History

In April 1941, about two months before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht set up numerous prisoner of war camps intended solely for Russian POWs. One of these camps was established on the former drill grounds in Zeithain near Riesa. The first 2,000 prisoners of war arrived in Zeithain in July 1941. After being registered and admitted, the prisoners were left to vegetate in the open. There was no housing, and they were subjected to all weather conditions. Moreover, there was a shortage of water and food, due to which many of the prisoners fell ill. The Soviet POWs also had to conduct forced labour: from July 1941 on, they built housing for the guards as well as offices and service rooms. Only in September 1941 did they begin building barracks for themselves. The number of inmates rapidly grew, and within four weeks of the first transport there were about 32,000 people at the camp. From September 1942 on, the Zeithain camp served as a branch of the nearby Stalag IV B Mühlberg for relocating prisoners to other camps. Stalag 304 was eventually moved from Zeithain to Belgium. During that time, the camp at Zeithain became a »reserve military hospital« for Soviet POWs from the entire defence circle IV deemed incapable of working. Provisions for the ill were severely insufficient, resulting in 10 to 20 deaths a day. On April 23, 1945, units of the Red Army liberated to camps at Mühlberg and Zeithain.

Zeithain, 1943/44, Roll call in front of the barracks at the POW camp, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover

Zeithain, 2003, View of the exhibition, Gedenkstätte Ehrenhain Zeithain

Victims

Between 30,000 and 35,000 Soviet POWs perished at the prisoner of war camp in Zeithain. Most of them died as a result of illnesses and starvation. At least 1,000 Soviet prisoners were »selected« by the Gestapo and murdered at the Buchenwald concentration camp. There were also prisoners of other nationalities held at Zeithain, mostly Italian military internees and members of the Polish Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa). About 900 Italians died between October 1943 and 1945 in Zeithain. After the Warsaw Uprising was suppressed in 1944, about 1,400 Polish prisoners were brought to Zeithain. Almost all of the Polish prisoners survived, since - unlike Soviet POWs - they were treated by the Wehrmacht in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

After 1945, the former camp premises were again used as military drill grounds, and the Soviet army practised manoeuvres there. After the Russian troops were withdrawn in 1994, the area became a nature reserve.
In 1949, the Soviet authorities set up the Zeithain Memorial Grove on the site of the first mass graves, on the »Russian cemetery« close to the former camp premises. Further mass graves were remodelled into a cemetery complex. In 1985, an exhibition was opened in the former residential house of the cemetery gardener (today: the documentation house). At the time, the exhibition did not mention the non-Soviet victims of the camp, instead emphasizing the role of the communist resistance. This interpretation of the camp history was in accordance with the contemporary communist state propaganda. The Zeithain Memorial Grove was closed after German reunification. At the beginning of the 1990s, volunteers campaigned for the memorial's restoration. In 1995, the Foundation of Memorials in Saxony began researching the history of Stalag 304. In 2001, a former camp barrack, which continued to be in use after 1945, was reconstructed. It now houses a memorial with a permanent exhibition, which was opened in 2003.

Zeithain, 2010, Entrance to the Zeithain Memorial Grove, Gedenkstätte Ehrenhain Zeithain

Zeithain, 2010, Documentation house next to the former camp barrack, Gedenkstätte Ehrenhain Zeithain

Possibilities

Guided tours of the memorial and the former camp grounds, work camps, teacher training

Open

Monday to Thursday: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.;
Friday: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.;
Saturdays, Sundays and on holidays: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Closed on December 24 and 31

Contact

http://www.ehrenhain-zeithain.de

ehrenhain.zeithain@stsg.de

+49 (0)3525 760 392

Zum Ehrenhain 1
01619 Zeithain

Zeithain, 1942, Prisoner of war, Gedenkstätte Ehrenhain Zeithain

Zeithain, 2011, Former camp barrack, Gedenkstätte Ehrenhain Zeithain

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