Alter Friedhof Leonberg

Cemetery description

In the town of Leonberg, between 1944 and April 1945, there operated a kommando of the Natzweiler concentration camp. The prisoners worked in an underground motorway tunnel (Alter Engelbergtunnel) that had been transformed into a Messerschmitt armaments plant. As a result of hunger, disease and persecution, 389 men died in the Leonberg camp. Among these, 308 victims are known by their first and last names, but the identity of 81 prisoners remains unknown.
When the camp was operational, hundreds of exhausted prisoners and those unsuitable for work were transferred to the Dachau, Vaihingen/Enz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, where they soon died. A large number of prisoners also died during the evacuation of the camp and the resulting death march in April 1945.
The mass grave of 337 victims of this concentration camp (including 104 Poles) can be found in the south-eastern part of the cemetery. It is marked by a stone plaque with a memorial text that reads: ‘You - 389 sons of many European peoples... victims of the regime in those dark times. Your death compels us to do what is righteous, to fight against lawlessness and to worship God in His beings.” The grave is grown over by an arrangement of flowers and other plants and it is marked by several small name plaques (e.g. one devoted to Józef Dzitkowski, another one - to the Italian victims).
In 1953, the victims’ remains were exhumed from the mass graves located upon the hillside of Blosenberg and some of the remains of those that came from Western Europe (36) were moved to their home countries, while the majority - 337 - were buried here. The memorial, which was created in 1962, was complemented, in 2014, by information boards that bear the names of the identified victims. Apart from the graves of the camp’s victims, the cemetery holds 5 single graves of Polish citizens who died in the area after the war.

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