Photo survey of the patrimony of Valozhyn District 2018 (part II).
Фотавандроўка па спадчыне Валожынскага раёна 2018 г (частка II).
World War I cemeteries (part LXXX): German cemetery, Sinjaja Hara.
Могілкі Першай сусьветнай вайны (частка LXXX): нямецкія могілкі, Сіняя Гара.
From September 1915 to November 1917 the German, Austrian and Russian imperial armies, indifferent to the rights of the Belarusian nation, contested part of the World War I Eastern Front on a static southwest to northeast line across Belarusian lands. According to Belarusian photographer-historian Uladzimir Bahdanau, during that time the German, Austrian and Russian imperial armies established more than 300 military cemeteries along this section of the front. Estimates vary from 106 to more than 150 German cemeteries which remain or whose former sites are locatable.
After World War I the newly-formed German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge — VDK or “Volksbund”) paid the government of the Second Polish Republic to look after German war cemeteries on Polish territory. Between 1921 and the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of September 1939, Polish territory included the western Belarusian lands (thus Sinjaja Hara). The tombstones at the Sinjaja Hara cemetery, which lies on the other side of the ridge from the German cemetery at Dudy (see photos of the day for December 11, 2021 and December 12, 2020), appear to be a mix of the original German ones and Polish-era replacement concrete tombstones with inscriptions in Polish.
In stark contrast, at no time did the Soviet regime show interest in honoring World War I Russian imperial army graves in territories under Soviet occupation. After occupying the western Belarusian lands when it invaded Poland in September 1939 together with Nazi Germany and again after driving the Germans out in 1944, the Soviet regime neglected, or allowed the destruction of, World War I cemeteries there. Some local Belarusian authorities continue to allow depredation of German World War I cemeteries to this day, for instance in Bartashy (Shchuchyn District) in 2018.
