The field postcard

The story of two names on the Ramlinger memorial to the fallen, told on the basis of a field postcard, sent in September 1939.

Seventeen-year-old Friedrich Schönemann writes this card on 25 September 1939 to his friend Wilhelm Könecke, who has recently been drafted into the army.

The Schönemanns live at Ramlingen No. 60, the first house on the left on today’s Vizestraße. The Könecke family farm, which Wilhelm is to take over as a son, is located in Gehrbergsweg, just a few metres away.

At the front of the map are the sights of the home village: the old chapel, the Reuße department store, the Voltmer inn; the memorial to the fallen of the Great War, erected a few years ago in the new cemetery.

It is not yet the “First World War”, because nobody yet realises that the invasion of Poland on 1 September just a few weeks ago is the beginning of an almost six-year inferno that will later be called the “Second World War”.

The war is four weeks old when Friedrich, known as Friedel, writes to Wilhelm, and the family also greets the 24-year-old, who has just joined the army.

Wilhelm probably has the opportunity to write back. At this time, he is stationed with his regiment near Brunswick. Soon afterwards, he takes part in the campaign against France, the hated hereditary enemy. It does not take long, the French quickly capitulate and the hastily founded Vichy government will soon collaborate with the Nazi regime.

But just under a year later, a new deployment order follows in the summer, and this time it’s to the east. With the invasion of the Soviet Union, known as Operation Barbarossa, Germany begins an incomparably brutal war of extermination that will cost the lives of many millions of people.

Thanks to rapid military successes, the Wehrmacht advances eastwards at great speed. But even before the first major battle is fought, Wilhelm Könecke, a lance corporal in the 8th Artillery Regiment, Section 171, is killed on 11 August 1941 at the age of 26.

He is buried, like many others, in a makeshift grave at the edge of a forest. The Wehrmacht moves on towards Moscow and the war continues for almost four more years. Three and a half million German soldiers lose their lives during the campaign against the Soviet Union, an incredible 27 million soldiers and civilians will die on the Soviet side.

Wilhelm’s body is reburied a few months later to a so-called “collection site” named Theofania, a provisional military cemetery of the Wehrmacht a few kilometres north of the place where he fell. A total of almost 1200 soldiers rest there.

Ten years after the end of the war, on 12 June 1955, the memorial plaques for the fallen and missing of the Second World War are dedicated at the memorial in the Ramlinger cemetery. This is also where Wilhelm Könecke’s name now finds its place – on the memorial that was depicted on the front of the first picture postcard written to him as a soldier .

Four decades later, Wilhelm will find his final resting place: At a central memorial site south-west of Theofania, which the German War Graves Commission set up after the collapse of the Soviet Union to enable a centralised commemoration on site. There are now 26,000 soldiers buried there; the reburial has not yet been completed.

The project, which the Volksbund began in the mid-1990s with the aim of transferring as many fallen soldiers as possible to five central final resting places and memorials, had to be stopped in February 2022. A war makes it impossible to continue until further notice.

This is because Wilhelm Könecke fell in the Ukraine, just a few kilometres south of Kiev. Today, the provisional Theofania military cemetery is located in the extended city area, and the central memorial site set up by the Volksbund is around 25 kilometres south-west of the city centre.

The fact that where Wilhelm Könecke and countless others were hastily buried 80 years ago, graves are once again being hastily dug in the present day to bury men, women and children killed in a bloody war creates a connection and an urgency that was difficult to imagine until recently.

How the author of the picture postcard, the young Friedel Schönemann, fared in the three years after Wilhelm Könecke’s death has not yet been sufficiently researched. But in the final months of the war, on 30 January 1945, he too is killed during the German Wehrmacht’s retreat near Rosenau, close to the village of Wormditt (Polish: Orneta) in what is now Poland. His parents and his fiancée will live in uncertainty about his fate for four years until it is finally confirmed where and when he has died.

Friedrich’s name appears on the memorial, too, a few lines below that of his friend Wilhelm.

(Text: Sven Voigt)