Ostlandkreuz
memorial crosses in Germany
Ostlandkreuz (German for "Eastern Lands Cross") or Kreuz des deutschen Ostens ("Cross of the German East") is the name of memorial crosses in Germany remembering the large-scale Ethnic cleansing of Central and Eastern Europe of its German-speaking population. After border shifts and population transfers agreed at the Potsdam Conference, German-speakers were expelled from the former Sudetenland areas of Czechoslovakia, from the Former eastern territories of Germany annexed by Poland and the Soviet part of the former Province of East Prussia. While most of these crosses stand in cemeteries, some are erected as landmarks on mountains.
Locations
In Germany there are several hundred Ostlandkreuze, most of which are located in cemeteries. The following list is restricted to the most prominent Ostlandkreuze erected on exposed locations.
Bad Harzburg
On 24 June 1950 a 20.5-metre-high (67 ft), wooden cross, the Kreuz des Deutschen Ostens, was dedicated on the Uhlenklippen crags near Bad Harzburg in the presence of Ernst Reuter. This cross stood for over 47 years before being blown down on 4 March 1998 during a hurricane.
On 30 September 2000 a new 17.7-metre-high (58 ft) and 6.3-metre-wide (21 ft), partly wooden-clad, steel cross was dedicated on the same spot. The construction cost came to 180,000 DM. Around the cross in a wide arc is a footpath on the outside of which are small rough-hewn stone monuments facing the cross; each one with a shield representing one of the former German provinces in Central Europe, east to its modern border. The cross is checkpoint no.
“Ostlandkreuz” enters the record as memorial crosses in Germany. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ostlandkreuz, memorial and crosses can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ostlandkreuz” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.