The remains of more than 1.8 million German and foreign dead from both world wars lie in Germany. In addition to thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers, almost 400 SS men are also buried in a military cemetery in Hofkirchen near Passau.
The SS was declared a criminal organization in the Nuremberg Trials of Major War Criminals. It was a terrorist group that was responsible for the atrocities in the concentration camps, for numerous violent crimes in the wars of extermination and for the murderous implementation of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. It was “a state within a state,” as Eugen Kogon wrote about the German concentration camp system in his standard work “The SS State.” A system in which the “awfulness of evil” has come to light.
Among the dead in the Hofkirchen cemetery is SS-Sturmscharführer Karl Jochum, a member of the Totenkopf SS, who made a career in the Dachau and Flossenbürg concentration camps. At the end of the war he accompanied a murderous death march of concentration camp prisoners as a security guard. SZ editor Patrick Wehner from the Bayern editorial team spoke to Erwin Farkas, a survivor of this infernal march. Farkas was shocked when he learned that the commemoration in Hofkirchen does not distinguish between victims and perpetrators.
Wehner says: “It was important to me that no one could say they didn’t know exactly who was buried there.” After the publication of Wehner’s research, the responsible district office in Passau promised that a learning location with appropriate display boards should be set up in Hofkirchen in the future.
The text of Wehner’s research on the “Cemetery of the Perpetrators” can be found here.
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