The German war cemetery at Cheb in the Czech Republic is a modern Volksbund cemetery created so that German Second World War dead from across the region could finally have a central resting place. Around 6,000 soldiers and civilian victims now lie here, many of them brought in from scattered field graves and temporary depots decades after the war ended.
In this video I walk through the cemetery and slow down on a few of the names: Generalleutnant Franz Wilhelm Karl Geiger, who ended the war as a senior engineer commander and now shares a grave with unknown soldiers; Oberst Bruno Weiler, a highly decorated commander of a Ski-Jäger regiment on the Eastern Front, buried here as an “unknown” in Block 3; Gefreiter Peter Halmbacher, an infantryman who survived the winter campaign of 1941/42 in the East but was killed in Prague in February 1945; and Alwin Fussenegger, a sawmill worker from Dornbirn who died in a Czech military hospital weeks after the German surrender. Their stories show how very different lives and ranks all ended up in the same ground at Cheb.
The aim of Walking4History is not to glorify war or anyone’s uniform, but to understand who is actually lying in these graves and how they ended up so far from home. Cemeteries like Cheb are places of remembrance and also of difficult questions: how we deal with German war dead in countries that suffered under occupation, and what it means to remember individuals without forgetting the crimes of the regime they served.
00:00 – Intro
00:56 – Why Cheb?
02:31 – Who is buried here and why the cemetery is controversial
03:19 – Mass graves, name plaques and research disclaimer
04:10 – Story 1: Generalleutnant Franz Geiger – engineer officer to division commander
06:56 – Story 2: Oberst Bruno Weiler – decorated Ski-Jäger colonel and his fate in 1945
10:02 – Story 3: Gefreiter Peter Halmbacher – frontline infantryman from the Eastern Front to Prague
11:34 – Story 4: Alwin Fussenegger – Austrian sawmill worker turned soldier, dying weeks after the war
12:52 – Reflection: what these graves tell us about war, Europe, and how we remember their stories
Credit to : Walking4History