Memorial 234 Soviet War Victims Lüdenscheid

Memorial 234 Soviet War Victims Lüdenscheid

In Lüdenscheid a monument was unveiled on May 8, 2022 with the names of 234 war victims from the Soviet Union. They died just after the liberation of tuberculosis in the Reservelazarett Lüdenscheid-Baukloh, which was equipped by American troops in April 1945 as an emergency hospital for sick prisoners of war.

The Americans did not want to bury these Allied soldiers on enemy territory. That is why they took the remains of 133 war victims of these prisoners of war from the Soviet Union to the American Battlefield in Margraten in the Netherlands. In 1947/1948 they were reburied at the Soviet War Cemetery in Leusden.

The other soldiers are buried in Lüdenscheid. They died when the British took control of the city from the Americans.

The monument represents two lungs with all alveoli. All 234 Soviet soldiers who died in the Reserve Lazarett Baukloh suffered from the lung disease tuberculosis, as a result of the appalling treatment in which they had been treated in captivity.

For a long time in Lüdenscheid, 40 kilometers south of Dortmund, it was not known that 234 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union had died in the Reservelazarett Baukloh. The Americans had requisitioned the hospital, on a hill just outside the city and out of sight of the locals.

It was only when researcher Remco Reiding made inquiries in Lüdenscheid in 2009 that local historians first learned about the many Soviet soldiers who had died in their city in April, May and June 1945. This eventually led to a monument with the names of the prisoners of war. The data was partly supplied by the Soviet Field of Honor Foundation, the organization that Reiding founded with others in 2010 to keep the memory of war victims alive.

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Source

• Text: Stichting Sovjet Ereveld
• Photos: Stichting Sovjet Ereveld