War dead memorial daubed: With red paint against the commemoration

The text is clear.

"Vandalism against Nazi commemoration" is written above the claim of responsibility published on a website by an anonymous group of "anti-fascists".

On the night of August 12, she "visited and decorated" the war dead memorial in Frankfurt's main cemetery.

The intruders used red paint to write “The Victims” above the entrance to “The Perpetrators”.

The text inside the rotunda was smeared, and above the "Reclining Warrior" on the wall that has not yet been repainted is written: "No SS monument!!!"

Bernhard Biener

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung

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The Parks Department has filed a complaint.

The start of cleaning was delayed because the job first had to be put out to tender and then it turned out that the cleaning water endangered the amphibians in the rotunda basin.

The stones have now been cleaned, and the walls will be reworked next week.

The office cannot say how the perpetrators got to the cemetery.

Although there has been graffiti on the street side of the cemetery walls, an incident of this magnitude has not yet been reported.

Volksbund insulted

In the letter, the perpetrators primarily attacked the German War Graves Commission, calling it a "fascists' association" that practiced "disgustingly obvious war revisionism".

The memorial obscures the difference between perpetrators and victims, because "there are also demonstrably SS men and war criminals" lying there.

The Volksbund expressed dismay at the paint attack: As a humanitarian organization, it not only takes care of the recording and maintenance of graves of German war dead abroad on behalf of the federal government, but has also been organizing youth and educational work as well as the exchange of young people for 70 years and mediates Values ​​like human rights, democracy and peace.

The chairman of the Hesse state association in the Volksbund War Graves Commission, former finance minister and state parliament president Karl Starzacher, makes the perpetrators an offer to talk.

"We are interested in a real debate that can also be controversial," says the social democrat.

Violence, including damage to property, is strictly rejected by the state association.

Contrary to what the perpetrators believe, the Volksbund neither financed nor had the Frankfurt memorial built.

"It's an urban facility," says Götz Hartmann, who prefers to use the neutral term war dead memorial.

The historian is in charge of a research project with which the Volksbund has been scientifically processing the history of the Hessian burial sites since 1999 - and in doing so is investigating exactly those questions that allegedly drove the perpetrators of the spraying action.

However, their actions betray above all ignorance.

The research project of the Volksbund has proven that in addition to the rotunda, there are also a low double-digit number of members of the Waffen-SS among the 400 military personnel buried there in the burial ground.

But there are also soldiers there who were sentenced to death by the Wehrmacht judiciary and executed in Preungesheim.

The remainder of the 3,000 dead are mostly victims of air warfare.

"The figures show that the victims of the war are primarily civilians," says Hartmann.

The Volksbund has presented characteristic individual fates on an information board.

Pioneering work by the city of Frankfurt

The "anti-fascists" are bothered by the fact that a much smaller, inconspicuous memorial is dedicated to the victims of the Nazi extermination industry in Hadamar - the burial ground behind the sculpture "Job" by Gerhard Marcks.

According to the historian, the reason why the stone tablets have several names has to do with a deception by the Nazis.

They sent the relatives of the murdered urns containing mixed ashes, but not those of the respective "euthanasia" victims.

In the 1950s, it was a pioneering achievement by the city of Frankfurt to offer permanent rest for these victims in addition to care.

The Graves Act only provided for this in 1965.

The rotunda was erected in 1928 after long discussions in the city council to commemorate those who died in World War I.

Hartmann has seen many such monuments, he says that the figure of the lying warrior created by Paul Seiler, an emaciated, naked body, which only the helmet identifies as a soldier, stands in contrast to many more heroically designed figures.

“The Frankfurt figure has something decidedly non-martial about it.” Because it serves as a warning commemoration.