Three months before the beginning of the Second World War, by request of the Lord Mayor, the administration of the Evangelical-Lutheran St. John’s Cemetery reported burial plots available for “potential mass burials”.
When allied air raids on Dresden became ever more likely in summer 1943, the city administration had burial plots developed here for an extensive number of air-raid victims. Up until the end of 1943 a “grove of honour” (“Ehrenhain”) was laid out to create a last-resting place to be “worthy in every respect”.

Wholly without this pretension and for the most part in anonymous mass graves was how victims of the National-Socialist dictatorship were buried meanwhile at St. John’s Cemetery: Polish and Czech citizens who had been executed at Dresden Regional Court. Perished prisoners of Dresden concentration camp subcamps, forced labourers and prisoners of war.

After the air raids of February 1945 the burial plots that had been prepared at the grove of honour were already fully occupied two weeks later. Among the approximately 1,200 buried by then were the parents of 12-year-old Anita J., whose bodies a neighbour had brought here on foot from the Johannstadt neighbourhood using a bike trailer. “The dead were buried lying on their side without any cover. Each body had a 60-cm slot”, she remembers. After the cremation of bodies had been finished on the Old Market by early March 1945, the number of burials at St. John’s Cemetery rose quickly. All throughout the month, Dutch prisoners of war were on duty to “shovel graves” and “reconnoitre the terror’s bodies”. City officials kept a register and regularly reported the burial numbers to the city administration.

Together with those recovered in the post-war era, over 3,700 people are buried at St. John’s Cemetery who were killed in Dresden in February 1945.

Marked on 13 February 2009, 4 p.m.