The Bensheim-Auerbach Military Cemetery

 

The Bensheim-Auerbach Military Cemetery sits on the wooded slope of the Kirchberg above Auerbach, a district of Bensheim in Hesse, and preserves the remains of German soldiers killed in the First and Second World Wars. Its origins lie in the chaotic final months of the First World War, when local authorities began interring fallen soldiers from nearby hospitals and field facilities. By the early 1920s, the site had taken on the form of a modest military cemetery, with simple stone markers and a central memorial cross. It became one of many regional burial grounds maintained by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the German War Graves Commission.

The catastrophe of the Second World War transformed the cemetery. As the Western Front collapsed in March 1945, casualties surged across Hesse. Soldiers wounded in the fighting around the Bergstrasse, the Rhine crossings, and the Odenwald were brought to aid stations in Bensheim and surrounding towns. Those who died were buried on the Kirchberg, expanding the cemetery dramatically. After 1945, the Volksbund consolidated additional wartime graves from temporary plots in the region, making Bensheim-Auerbach a permanent resting place for thousands.

The cemetery today contains more than 2,400 graves—roughly half from each world war. The design is austere: rows of low stone plaques set into grass, clusters of basalt crosses, and a central memorial area that lists the names of the dead when individual identification is known. The layout reflects post-war German memorial culture—somber, stripped of martial display, focused on individual loss rather than national glory.

In the decades since, the cemetery has served as a site for quiet remembrance rather than public ceremony. School groups, local historians, and families visit to confront the scale of twentieth-century German military death. Its hillside setting above Auerbach emphasizes the contrast between the peaceful landscape and the violent history beneath it, making it one of the more sobering military cemeteries along the Bergstrasse.

In 2017 I visited the German Military Cemetery in Normandy. The same focus on the soldier, not on the government that sent them to war.