The Catholic Cemetery in Wolfenbüttel holds a burial site containing the graves of victims of the Nazi judicial system. Right next to the cemetery chapel, in four rows, one can find twenty headstones with metal plaques that bear the personal information of those buried here; eleven are Poles. Several victims identified as Poles (their names are inscribed upon the memorial plaques) actually came from different countries.
On one of the walls of the chapel there is a glass plaque stating that, between 1937 and 1947, more than 500 prisoners were executed in the Wolfenbüttel prison. Among these were 146 Catholics, who were buried in this cemetery. In the 1950s, the remains of some of the victims from Western Europe were exhumed and transferred to their countries of origin.
According to the available archival materials, all told, approximately 80 Polish citizens were buried in this cemetery, 60 of whom were executed in the Wolfenbüttel prison, but their graves have not survived to this day. Some of the victims are commemorated in the above-mentioned burial site and by means of a memorial plaque. The remaining 20 graves in the cemetery contain the remains of victims of the war and forced labour as well as those of Polish displaced persons who died immediately after the war.
The Memorial Site in the Wolfenbüttel prison, which is part of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, wolfenbuettel.stiftung-ng.de, is responsible for both the research into the fate of the victims of the judicial system and its documentation.
