Leitenberg KZ-Friedhof

Cemetery description

On top of Leitenberg Hill, on the outskirts of the town of Dachau, there is a cemetery containing the remains of the Dachau concentration camp victims. From February 1945 until late April 1945, the commandant’s office compelled the camp’s prisoners to dig 8 mass graves and transport there the bodies of their dead fellow prisoners (at that time bodies were not cremated due to the lack of coal). By the time the US Army liberated the camp on 29 April 1945, 4,318 persons had been buried in those mass graves.
Following the camp’s liberation, two more graves were dug for prisoners who had died of emaciation, and for the Wehrmacht soldiers who had died in battles in the vicinity of the town. Until 18 May 1945, another 1,879 persons were buried on Leitenberg Hill.
The site remained neglected until the Concentration Camp Cemetery had been established and officially consecrated on 15 December 1949. At the turn of 1951 and 1952, the Hall of Remembrance was built there. Between 1955 and 1959, the French exhumed the remains of the French citizens - the camp’s victims, and transported them to their home country.
In 1959, the cemetery on Leitenberg Hill was officially acknowledged as a cemetery of victims of the Dachau concentration camp whose number amounts to 7,609. Right behind the entrance gate of the cemetery there is a monument commemorating Polish citizens who died in the Dachau camp. The monument bears Bolesław Najder’s appeal that says: ‘Respect those who escaped the hell of the camps unharmed; worship, keep in your heart those who stayed there forever.’
Personal data of former prisoners and victims of the Dachau concentration camp and its sub-camps can be found on www.straty.pl.

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