0151 Historische Rahmenbedingungen für den Bau von Kriegsgräberstätten in Deutschland und Europa im 20. Jahrhundert

Abstract

State obligation to guarantee both individual burial and upkeep of graves of fallen soldiers and victims of political violence has become a respected principle in international relations during the course of the 20^th century. Much academic attention has been paid to responses of societies to western front wartime experiences and the subsequent creation of vast interwar period cemeteries, which established a common notion of the war grave as a symbol for the destructive outcome of modern warfare. In Germany, however, where most war cemeteries were built after 1945, war graves are less entangled with the history of trench warfare. Since maintenance of war graves can be understood as an international practice since WW I, this nevertheless allowed Germany to build war cemeteries in various countries in the decades after the Second World War. This article examines the international preconditions under which war cemeteries were built after both World Wars and how this affected access to gravesites, maintaining war graves, and even cemetery design.