Ostfriedhof

Cemetery description

The Eastern (Ostfriedhof) Cemetery is the largest memorial and burial site for Polish victims of World War II in Leipzig.
The graves of victims originating from Central and Eastern Europe are located in the south-eastern part of the cemetery.
Burial Section No. X8 holds the main memorial dedicated to Polish victims of the 1939-1945 war. Four columns forming a portal bear 14 plaques with almost 500 names inscribed upon them, most of whom are buried in Sections Nos. X7, X8, X9 and X10 located right behind this memorial. The deceased were concentration camp prisoners, prisoners of war, male and female forced labourers and their children that were murdered, killed or died in Leipzig or its neighbourhood. In front of the portal stands a tall metal cross. The present-day memorial was created in 2009 in place of the former monument that dated back to the times of the German Democratic Republic.
Burial Section No. X7 holds the memorial dedicated to men and women forced labourers. The memorial was built by the City of Leipzig in 1999. On the edge of the site one can find a memorial plaque with the following inscription: ‘In this burial section lie 766 war victims of various nationalities who died during World War II far from their homeland. Remember them and all the victims of both World Wars.’
The site is also marked by several dozen metal plaques that bear the names of the victims, the largest number of whom came from Poland. Citizens of almost all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are also buried here.
The neighbouring Section X2 holds a separate cemetery for victims who came from the Soviet Union. There are 259 single graves of the Red Army soldiers and 4 collective graves of 1,277 civilians from the USSR, among whom are Polish citizens (6 of them are known by name). The central part of the cemetery is marked by two Soviet monuments from the years 1946 and 1948.
The nearby Section X5 holds the memorial of 32 men that were shot dead by a Wehrmacht execution kommando in April 1945 in the barracks of Leipzig-Gohlis. The memorial text states that the victims were members of the resistance movement from Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria. In the actual fact, however, none of the deceased was Polish. The same burial section holds two collective graves of the children of female forced labourers that died during World War II. The glass memorial plaques bear the names of 12 infants, 3 of whom were of Polish origin.
The state of all the burial sections and memorials is very good (October 2022).

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