Friedhof Perlacher Forst

Cemetery description

The Perlacher Forst cemetery is the central memorial site commemorating World War II victims in Munich, and has a burial site for victims of concentration camps, the Dachau concentration camp in particular. The urns contain the remains of prisoners of different nationalities found in the Munich cemeteries after the war. Under the 44 stone plaques there are buried 3,996 prisoners, only 3,972 of whom were identified. Half of the deceased were Polish citizens. It is worth noting that among the Polish political prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp, there were numerous intellectuals, civil servants, community activists and priests, who were perceived as enemies of the Nazi regime. Now, the cemetery is the final resting place for 185 priests, 7 of whom have been pronounced blessed by the Catholic Church. The central part of this memorial site contains a fountain with a mosaic presenting the Gate to Paradise, and the Stone of Hope. In 2021, due to the financial resources invested by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the Foundation for ‘Polish-German Reconciliation’ carried out the renewal of the burial site. As part of this project, memorial plaques with the names of almost 4,000 victims were put up, as well as information boards in Polish, English and German, providing information about the Dachau concentration camp and the fate of its victims and the victims of the Nazi euthanasia programme whose remains lie in the burial site for the victims of the Dachau camp.
In the cemetery there is another burial site with the remains of 94 victims of executions in the Stadelheim prison. It is marked by a large stone with the names of all the victims inscribed upon it, Polish citizens among others.
The cemetery also contains war graves of soldiers of the National Armed Forces (NSZ), who, after the war, served in American guard units since they could not return to their home country. Their bodies were exhumed and moved here from the Westfriedhof cemetery in 1997. Both the individual graves and the memorial slab commemorating the Polish soldiers were funded by the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites.
Next to the Polish soldiers’ graves, there is another burial site for so-called ‘displaced persons’, the final resting place for 1,192 persons from different countries who were deported to Germany to do forced labour. Graves from the Waldfriedhof, Nord-und Westfriedhof, Pasing, Obermenzing, Allach, Aubing, and Perlacher Forst cemeteries in Munich were moved here. Among them were those of 290 Polish citizens - men, women and children.

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