Magdeburg, Westfrdh.

Magdeburg West Cemetery was established in 1898 and is the largest cemetery in Magdeburg at 62.5 hectares. Characteristic features of Magdeburg's West Cemetery include its neo-Gothic chapel, the park-like layout, the historic fountains and many historic gravestones and sculptures. In 1994, the entire cemetery was placed under a preservation order and the soldiers' graves from the First and Second World Wars alone cover an area of 10,000 square meters. Today, 273 German victims of the First World War who died between February 1915 and October 1920 rest in the cemetery. The victims are almost exclusively soldiers who died in Magdeburg's military hospitals. The number of war dead from the Second World War is much higher: there are 657 individual graves and two collective graves with 429 dead in the West Cemetery. These include the 174 deceased from the Margaretenhof military hospital cemetery, who were not reburied until 1995. The sculptor Fritz Cremer created a memorial to the victims of fascism in 1981. Victims of the Nazi regime are buried here, such as the doctor Otto Josef Schlein, who was murdered in Auschwitz. 740 gravestones with the dates of the victims commemorate those who were persecuted, resistance fighters and politicians murdered up to 1945. There is also a "memorial slab with urns of the 29 murdered prisoners of the 'Polte Werk' subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp" in the memorial grove. A total of 855 burials took place on this cemetery, which has a total area of around 5,000 square meters. A wall with the inscription "Keep your memory alive" surrounds the gravestones. A female figure on the wall, which was also created by Fritz Cremer, is a reference to Bertolt Brecht's poem "O Germany, pale mother". The graves of those killed in the bombing of Magdeburg on January 16, 1945 are also located in the Westfriedhof. 6,000 people lost their lives in the devastating attack, 16,000 people were injured and 200,000 people were left homeless. The war victims' grove with a total area of approx. 15,500 square meters, which contains 2,199 individual graves and a collective grave with 40 dead, was given a memorial to the victims of the air raid in 1996. The sculptor Wieland Schmiedel created the impressive memorial to commemorate this horrific day. The cemetery also contains a mass grave and a memorial to 60 unknown victims from Klausener Straße in Magdeburg. The remains of 60 people were found during reconstruction work. The site used to be part of a KGB compound. It is assumed that the 60 people were murdered there in the 1950s. Since 1996, the cemetery has been home to a memorial stone of the Republic of Italy for fallen Italian military internees who have since been exhumed and repatriated. In 2003, the Westfriedhof cemetery won an award for its state of maintenance and its innovatively designed burial plots.