Victims of Nazi Persecution: Perlacher Forst
Executed in Stadelheim prison. Victims of Nazi persecution in the Perlacher Forst cemetery
Stadelheim prison with its execution chamber was one of the places
where members of the German and European resistance met a common fate.
The collective grave (Sammelgrab II) in the Perlacher Forst cemetery
provides lasting testimony to this.
In 1954 Munich City Council took an official decision to move the mortal remains of ninety-five victims of the political organs of Nazi justice who had been executed in Stadelheim prison between 1942 and 1945 from their ordinary, unmarked graves and rebury them in a collective grave. The designation of the grave as “Sammelgrab II/KZ Ehrenhain II” was intended to honour the dead and give them a dignified final resting place. Sammelgrab II was marked only by the plants around it, however, and hence was soon forgotten.
To mark what would have been Hans Leipelt’s seventy-fifth birthday
on 18 July 1996, his former partner Marie-Luise Schulze-Jahn had a
gravestone erected bearing the names of all the people buried there.
This removed the anonymity the Nazi regime had wanted to confer on the
members of the resistance. Fifty years later their final resting place
can be identified thanks to the names on the gravestone.
But anonymity is only really removed when you know something about a
person and about his or her life. This is the purpose of the present
publication. It also provides an insight into how the Nazi system of
judicially sanctioned terror functioned and into the heterogeneous,
multinational and contradictory nature of the resistance.
You can download the volume (in German) in PDF format
here:
pdf-File
(2,1 MB)Irene Stuiber, Hingerichtet in München-Stadelheim. Opfer
nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung auf dem Friedhof Perlacher Forst.
Mit einer Einleitung von Jürgen Zarusky, published by the Kulturreferat
der Landeshauptstadt München (Culture Department of the City of
Munich), Munich 2004
ISBN 3-8334-0733-6
