Lingen Kriegsgräberstätte - German War Cemetery
Lingen Neuer Friedhof (info Volksbund)
Contains, divided over 3 burial fields, approximately 450 Second World War graves.
German soldiers' graves at the cemetery entrance: Over 211 German military and civilian war dead are buried here
Around half of them died in Lingen hospitals before the final battles in April 1945, were shot down in aerial combat or fell or died in air raids on the railway facilities and the Lingen railway repair shop in 1944. During the fierce final battles in and around Lingen between April 2nd and 4th, 1945, over 100 mostly young soldiers and civilians with no combat experience fell or were killed in fighter-bomber attacks. Over 20 of them remained unknown.
Row L, Grave 13.
Karl-Heinz Heßler, 17, a young man from the Ruhr region.
He was fatally wounded on April 4, 1945, as the German troops retreated into the forests southeast of the city.
Karl-Heinz Heßler was actually still a student at the end of the war and was attending high school. He wanted to become a doctor later. But he was discharged from school with an emergency high school diploma and sent straight to the Wehrmacht to fight in Lingen.
There, like many comrades of the same age, he met his death as a soldier.
Foreigners' graves: in the middle of the cemetery on the right main path:
Originally 978 foreign war dead were buried here, who died in plane crashes, from war injuries, from bombs, infectious diseases and epidemics in the camps. Most of them were transferred to their home countries in the years after the end of the war.
Today, 196 war dead, mostly Soviet, Polish and Serbian, still rest here.
Soviet gravesite at the end of the right main path:
45 prisoners of war/forced laborers from the areas of the former Soviet Union rest here.
