The database

The „Law on the Preservation of Graves of Victims of War and Tyranny“ (Graves Act) came into force on 1 July 1965. According to the 2012 amendment, it serves “to commemorate the victims of war and tyranny in a special way and to keep alive for future generations the memory of the terrible consequences of war and tyranny“. Among other things, the Graves Act regulates which graves located in Germany are considered war graves and should be maintained and permanently preserved at public expense. In the Cologne city area, the municipal office for landscape conservation and green spaces is responsible for the maintenance of war graves in 44 cemeteries and two burial sites for victims of National Socialism. The basis for this is the “grave lists for publicly maintained graves“, which were created nationwide in accordance with the Graves Act of 1 July 1965.

Numerous inquiries from individuals searching for their relatives who died in Cologne during the Second World War cannot be answered on the basis of the “grave lists“. There are two main reasons for this: either the names – this applies in particular to Eastern European names – are spelled so incorrectly in the grave lists that the persons cannot be identified. Or the names are not included in the grave lists.

In order to provide relatives with information, the NS-Documentation Centre has therefore edited the grave lists scientifically. Firstly, the war graves database was created on the basis of the “Grave Lists for Publicly Maintained Graves“ held by the Office for Landscape Conservation and Green Spaces. In this first step, the information on grave locations, names, gender, date and place of birth, date and place of death or age at the time of death and nationality contained in the lists was recorded true to the source. Although fatalities from the First World War period are listed in the grave lists and can be found in Cologne cemeteries, they were not included in this database. In the next processing step, the personal data was expanded on the basis of further sources and information on persons not previously included was added (please also see below).

The history of the Graves Act

On 29 December 1922, the German parliament passed the “Law on the Preservation of War Graves from the World War“. After the Second World War, a new version of this law was necessary. The first version of the “Act on the Care of War Graves“  (Graves Act) was passed on 27 May 1952. In simple terms, it declared the graves of German and foreign military and civilian personnel who had died as a direct result of the war or as a result of its consequences up to 1953 to be war graves.

The focus was therefore on the civilian and military victims of the years 1939-1945, not the victims of the Nazi regime since 1933. Only in § 6 the graves of victims of National Socialism, but also deported forced labourers, as well as those of German and "ethnic German" resettlers and displaced persons were named. Their graves were to be maintained at the expense of the public purse, but no provision was made for their permanent preservation.

With the “Law on the Preservation of the Graves of Victims of War and Tyranny“ (Graves Act) passed on 1 July 1965, these graves were also rededicated as war graves and commemoration was enshrined as a legal objective.

Victims of the war and victims of National Socialism not included in the grave lists

The grave lists do not include, for example, those who died in Cologne during or as a result of bombing raids and whose bodies were not buried in one of the graves that had already been laid out during the war or were reburied in war cemeteries after 1945. This was often at the request of the relatives. In some cases, relatives had missed the deadline for reburial in a war cemetery, which applied until 1969. The information on this group of people is gradually being added to this database using various sources. Because the relatives had opted for a private grave at the time, only the cemeteries and not the individual grave locations are published, if known.

On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the “1000 bomber raid“ in 2017, we have analysed the details of 402 victims listed in a report by the Cologne police chief dated 15 July 1942 for this database. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the “Peter and Paul attack“, about 3,500 further personal details were added from the police chief's report on the attack of 29 June 1943.

As some of the people who were in Cologne did not die until days or weeks after the bombing raid, 29 June 1943 was only entered as the date of death in the records if it could be verified on the basis of the list of graves, a burial register or a death certificate. In total, the attack is said to have claimed around 4,400 lives. It can be assumed that some of the approximately 900 additional victims are listed in the grave lists, but could not yet be identified as victims of this attack due to the lack of death data. Here too, the examination of further sources will gradually contribute to clarification.

Also not included in the Cologne grave lists are those soldiers who died on the front or in military hospitals in their area of deployment. These soldiers can usually be found in the Volksbund database. The graves of Nazi victims were only classified as permanently preserved in the Graves Act twenty years after the end of the war. By this time, many resting periods in cemeteries had already expired. An unknown but presumably large number of graves of Nazi victims had therefore already been levelled. These graves can only be found again via the cemeteries' burial registers if the name and persecution history of the person are known or the place of death provides relevant information (such as “Buchenwald concentration camp”). The burial register for Cologne's Westfriedhof (West cemetery) has been analysed for the database in this respect, with more to follow.

Another reason why people who we now regard as victims of National Socialism were not included in the list of graves is the definition of this group used in the 1960s. The definition was based on the compensation legislation ("politically, racially or religiously persecuted persons"). This excluded, for example, German victims of the Nazi special courts, Nazi military justice or victims of the murder of the sick.

The grave lists also do not include the names of more than 150 children of Eastern European forced labourers who were buried in the West cemetery in 1944/45. They are not included in the lists because the children of forcibly deported foreigners were not initially regarded as "victims of war and tyranny". While such "children's graves" were gradually cleared away in numerous cities and municipalities in the Federal Republic of Germany, they have been preserved in Cologne (for example in the West cemetery on Field V of the site for Nazi victims).

Another example are the numerous French, Dutch, Belgians, Luxembourgers and Italians who died in Cologne during the war. Many of them were victims of the notorious "Nacht und Nebel" ("night and fog") deportations. They were executed in Cologne's Klingelpütz prison without the knowledge of their relatives and buried in Cologne. After the end of the war, their bodies were transferred to their home countries. As the gravesites had already been closed by the time the war grave lists were compiled, they were not included in the lists.

The graves of former forced labourers who lived in housing for "displaced persons" in Cologne after 1945 and died there by 30 June 1950 should also have been given the status of war graves in accordance with the 1965 Graves Act. Initial spot checks have shown that this did not happen in an as yet unquantifiable number of cases. The same applies to other victims of National Socialism, although the reasons why they were not taken into account when war graves were created are usually not recognisable. Using the example of the victims of the murder of the sick, it was possible to establish that the cemetery staff, for example, had an influence on who was registered as a "war victim" and who was considered for reburial on a war cemetery and who was not.

It should also be noted that Jewish victims who died in Cologne as a result of violence were buried in the cemetery of the Cologne synagogue community in Bocklemünd. Like the many thousands of other Jewish victims or Sinti and Romanies, politically persecuted people and many other groups who were murdered outside the Cologne city area and whose bodies were buried anonymously or cremated, are not included in any of these grave lists.

This database is therefore neither a list of all victims of National Socialism in Cologne nor a list of all war victims.

Victims of the war and victims of National Socialism who cannot be identified

The database contains around 1,200 details of people whose mortal remains were buried in Cologne cemeteries but whose names are not known. Some of these are people who died during bombing raids and whose bodies could not be identified. Sometimes contextual information - such as date of death, place of discovery, gender, approximate age - has survived for these unknown dead. Among the people listed as "unknown" are, for example, American or British pilots who were recovered from crashed aircrafts.

Another relatively large group in terms of numbers are the victims of special courts and the Gestapo, who were buried anonymously and about whose identity even the burial registers provide hardly any information. In a few cases, it has at least been possible to reconstruct the names of the deceased.

Research processing of the data sets

The entries in the grave lists are incomplete. The dates of birth are often missing, with only an age given instead. In many cases, only the date of burial is given instead of the date of death. The spelling of names is also often incorrect; in some cases it is even almost impossible to identify a person from the entry in the grave list. This applies in particular to the more than 2,700 dead of foreign nationality buried in Cologne's cemeteries. The names of Polish and Soviet prisoners of war, concentration camp prisoners and forced labourers in particular are often misspelled.

The information from the grave lists was initially transferred to the database in its original form and is also reproduced in the database in this form. Additions and corrections made during the revision of the data have been entered in additional fields. This makes it clear which data is contained in the grave lists and which data has been added by the NS-DOK from other sources. These additions are based, for example, on burial registers, plans for cemeteries, registry office documents, lists of the police chief at the time.

The data on the foreign dead has been processed particularly intensively, although not conclusively. This should make it easier for relatives to find the graves of those who died in Cologne during the war or immediately afterwards. For this reason, all spelling variants that are available in various sources for the respective persons have been included. In the case of Polish names, the probable spellings were inserted in a separate data field using the special Polish characters. Unfortunately, the names of members of the former Soviet Union cannot yet be reproduced in Cyrillic in our database. In order to provide assistance here too, the names have been transcribed from Russian.

Using the database

The database is currently only available in German.

You can find out the addresses of Cologne's cemeteries and the location of the war graves on the City of Cologne's website.

Information as of: 4 April 2022