Focus on Heimkehrerdenkmal and explain the Design.
The Heimkehrerdenkmal consists of four concrete panels representing the suffering of Wehrmacht soldiers. At 28-meters high, the Heimkehrerdenkmal is visible from the nearby highway.  The monument sits atop a small hill, surrounded by grass and trees just outside of Friedland, Germany.  While the monument does not heroize the German soldiers of World War II, it does conflate the suffering of the soldiers with the German civilians who lost their lives to the war.  The monument also makes no mention of the suffering caused by the Wehrmacht soldiers and the Nazi regime.The Heimkehrerdenkmal is one of the only examples of a German memorial to its soldiers that fought in the Second World War, and it is largely unknown by Germans today. The inscription on the monument lists the number of German soldiers (2,892,000), civilians (2,846,000), and prisoners of war (1,250,000) who died during the Second World War. The next sentence of the inscription lists the numbers of missing people: 1,163,600 German soldiers in combat, 100,300 prisoners of war, and 1,089,000 civilians.
The monument was the first of its kind in Germany. As German military historian Jörg Echternkamp explains, “Monuments from the 1950s, usually conceived of in a figurative formal language and featuring local references, recalled the consequences of the war such as imprisonment, flight, and expulsion; the resistance of 17 June 1953; or German partition. After 1967, however, a central monument dedicated to the war and its effects came into existence for the first time.”
Second World War prisoners of war Friedland, Germany Wehrmacht World War II