Ostfriedhof (Munich)

The oldest part of the Ostfriedhof was laid out in 1817 as the burial ground of Au on a narrow strip of the Auer Flur (on the present Tegernseer Landstraße) which extended into the territory of Giesing.

For several days the crematorium was made accessible to public viewing, with the director of the city of Munich burial department leading the tours himself, despite criticism in the local press.

Kurt Eisner, murdered on 21 February 1919, Minister-President of the short-lived Free State which preceded the Bavarian Soviet Republic, was buried in the Ostfriedhof.

Shortly after the Nazis took power the Monument to the Revolution was destroyed: it was demolished on 22 June 1933, and the urn with Eisner's ashes was moved to the New Jewish Cemetery, where it is still buried.

At the beginning of July 1934 the remains of 17 Nazis and opponents of Nazism killed during the Night of the Long Knives were brought to the cemetery in a furniture van (to avoid attention) and burnt.

An unknown number of people who were murdered for political reasons in Stadelheim Prison were cremated here, as were the bodies of 3,996 detainees from the concentration camps Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald as well as from the liquidation facilities of the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme.

In reality the bodies were those of ten Nazi war criminals condemned by the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials to be hanged: Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart.