The Cross Garden and Mary Garden

On Pentecost Sunday 1919, a ceremony was held at the Michael monument at St Anna’s Church in Schaag to honour community members killed in the First World War. After that, the dead and missing of the First and later also the Second World War were commemorated on Pentecost every year.

In 1949, Pastor Peter Schallenberg, who lived in Schaag at the time, discovered the remains of a demolished Siegfried Line bunker on Karstrasse and suggested the creation of a Way of the Cross there to commemorate the fallen. On his initiative, a seven-metre-high wooden cross was erected at this site, which was consecrated on Good Friday 1949. In the following months, the residents of Schaag laid paths in the surrounding woods and erected Stations of the Cross. The official inauguration of the Cross Garden took place on Pentecost Sunday 1950.

The following year, the Mary Garden was created directly adjacent to the Cross Garden, with pictorial representations of the ‘Seven Sorrows of Mary’. In 1954, the six-metre-high statue of the Madonna of the Protective Mantle was inaugurated, which remains a central feature of the Mary Garden to this day.