The Waldfriedhof cemetery is the burial place for the dead of the First and Second World Wars.
Burial
One of the largest war cemeteries in Germany was created in the early 1960s in a clearing to the east of Munich's Waldfriedhof cemetery. Almost 2,000 dead from the First World War and more than 1,550 victims of the Second World War found their final resting place at the site, which was completed in 1965. The buried belong to 18 nations. Among the dead of the Second World War are soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians - including those who were forced to work in Germany. More than 300 of those buried are foreign war victims, mainly Russian.
The war dead were transferred from seven Munich cemeteries and 164 mostly Upper Bavarian and Swabian communities to the cemetery at the Waldfriedhof. Each was given their own grave. The reburial service was unable to identify 83 of the dead from the Second World War.
In the civilian area of the Waldfriedhof there is also the so-called Cimitero Militare Italiano. This cemetery contains the remains of 3,249 Italian soldiers who died as prisoners of war. this burial ground was created in 1922 and an obelisk was erected as a memorial. As a result of the Second World War, there were graves of Italian nationals in a number of Bavarian cemeteries. These were combined in the new part of the Waldfriedhof.
History
The Munich Forest Cemetery is not only the largest cemetery in the city, but also the first forest cemetery to be established in Germany, built between 1905 and 1907.
More than 1.8 million German and foreign war dead from the First and Second World Wars rest in the cemeteries of the Federal Republic of Germany. 12.000 war cemeteries, cemeteries and individual graves in which victims of the war and Nazi tyranny are buried are spread across 7,600 towns and municipalities.
The Act on the Preservation of the Graves of Victims of War and Tyranny (Graves Act) and the "General Administrative Regulation" to the Graves Act (Domestic Design Guidelines) regulate the design, construction, care and maintenance of war gravesites. Responsibility for war graves in Germany is therefore transferred to the federal states, which generally leave the care and maintenance of the sites to the cemetery authorities.
The war cemetery at the Waldfriedhof is looked after by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V. (German War Graves Commission). The participants of the International Youth Camp, which takes place almost every summer in Munich, work on this war cemetery and maintain the graves there.
Special feature
A special architectural feature is the memorial hall, which consists of a white, towering triangle of concrete. A narrow, 13-meter-high disc of more than 1,800 prisms closes the gap between the concrete walls of the hall. The sunlight is refracted in these prisms. As a result, a colorful band of light moves across the back wall of the hall and illuminates the names of those who are immortalized there at the war cemetery.
North Cemetery - Grove of Honor for Air War Victims
War dead: 2,099
The air war claimed 6,500 lives in Munich. Unless burials took place in family graves, the dead were buried in the North Cemetery, the Perlacher Forst cemetery or in the Pasing and Aubing cemeteries in special burial grounds. The North Cemetery has existed since 1943, it was redesigned in 1959 and the last burials took place in 1963.
