The 7.6-hectare field of worship was initially divided into the districts or quarters of Lübeck's main churches of St. Jakobi, St. Petri, St. Marien, Dom and St. Aegidien, which jointly owned the cemetery.

[9][10] The personalities born in Lübeck who found their final resting place in the cemetery include the entrepreneur and patron Emil Possehl, whose mausoleum was designed by the architect Erich Blunck and the sculptor Hermann Joachim Pagels, the businessman Emil Minlos and the actor Günther Lüders (1905–1975).

[19] Marianne became famous in Germany after she shot and killed the rapist and murderer of her daughter in an act of vigilantism in the hall of the District Court of Lübeck in 1981.

[20] For the German and French soldiers who died in hospitals in Lübeck during and after the Franco-Prussian War, common graves were laid out in the cemetery.

[21] The grave of the German soldiers was adorned with a high, richly decorated sandstone monument, the tower-like structure of which was crowned with an Iron Cross.

"[21] A few steps from the German community grave is that of the French soldiers who died here, in the form of a granite boulder that was then overgrown with ivy.

Lübeck itself does not have a large public memorial to its fallen soldiers, mostly fusiliers from the home battalion of the 2nd Hanseatic Infantry Regiment No.

After a service on the morning of the feast day, a long procession with funeral music made its way to the "Allgemeinen Gottesacker" to decorate the war graves, which initially lay uncovered along the path that cut the length of the churchyard.

[22] For the victims of the First and later Second World War, the honorary cemetery was laid out on the other side of the road from the Sandberg in January 1915 and then expanded several times.