Abstract
The service of soldiers from the Hlučín Region in the German army during WWII is one of the episodes in history that still play a role in the memory. Simultaneously, it is one of the key factors of the local "imagined community".
More than 12 100 soldiers from the Hlučín Region were enlisted in the Wehrmacht and about 3 300 of them did not come back from the war. Their memory is kept on more than thirty collective memorials and commemorative plagues today that are spread all across the Region.
Several memorials or plagues were built during the communist regime, mostly closed to churches or chapels or inside of them. Since the 1990s new memorials have been erected and controversies appeared around them.
Meanwhile, these objects became an integral part of villages and towns in the Hlučín Region. Apart from memorials dedicated to fallen local soldiers, there are memorials and graves of soldiers of the Red Army and Wehrmacht soldiers as well, who fell in the Hlučín Region at the end of WWII.
Concepts of communicative and cultural memory will be applied to explain this phenomenon.