War Cemetery Gross Fullen

The first documented burial at the Fullen camp cemetery – now a war graves site – took place on 1 December 1941. According to the grave registers, this cemetery – which was established on the disused site of a former Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst) camp – is the final resting place of 136 Soviet prisoners of war whose names are known and approximately 1,500 ‘unknown’ Soviet prisoners of war, as well as one unidentified Albanian.

Based on the analyses carried out to date, it can be assumed that at least 449 Soviet prisoners of war were buried on the camp cemetery. 121 graves can be identified by name, the vast majority of which are mass graves.

In 1944 alone, 404 deaths of Italian military internees at the Fullen camp were reported to the registry office in Meppen. A total of approximately 751 Italians died at the Fullen camp; most of them fell victim to a rampant epidemic of pulmonary tuberculosis. They were buried at the Groß Fullen camp cemetery. At what is now the Fullen War Cemetery, exhumations and reburials of the Italians to Hamburg and Italy took place in 1955 and 1958. Twenty-nine victims were exhumed in the summer of 1955 and transferred to Italy. In April 1958, the remaining Italians were exhumed; 674 were reinterred at the Italian Cemetery of Honour in Hamburg-Oejendorf, whilst 48 were transferred to Italy.

In a separate section of the Fullen War Cemetery, 145 Polish men, women and children were buried who had died between July 1945 and January 1948 in the Polish enclave of Maczków (Haren/Ems).

The victims of the Nazi dictatorship buried in the war cemeteries are granted the right to eternal rest under the ‘Act on the Preservation of Graves and Victims of War and Tyranny’. The current layout of the cemeteries was largely established between 1951 and 1974. The artistic memorial design, in the form of monuments and stelae, adorns the cemetery without reflecting specific grave sites.