Ohlsdorf Cemetery - Memorial grove for members of the Hamburg resistance

On 8 September 1946, 27 urns holding the ashes of executed resistance members from the Hamburg labour movement were interred together in a burial ground next to the site for people killed in the revolution of November 1918. In 1947, more urns with ashes from executed resistance fighters were placed here. The graves are marked with pillow stones that bear the victims’ names and their dates of birth and death. The burial ground is now known as the ‘Ehrenhain’ or memorial grove.

New memorial grove
In the 1960s, the cemetery administration moved the urns. The new memorial grove was dedicated in its current site on 6 May 1962 by the Associated Working Group of Nazi Persecutees (Vereinigte Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Naziverfolgten, later the VVN/BdA). A board of trustees was established soon afterwards, and they commissioned the architect Karlheinz Rebstock to design a new memorial complex. In 1968, a bronze sculpture entitled ‘Der Redner’ (The Speaker) by the Hamburg sculptor Richard Steffen (1903–1964) was erected on the site. The sculpture was stolen by unknown individuals in March 2011. It was replaced with a new sculpture of ‘Der Redner’ in 2017. This new statue by Henning Hammond-Norden and Ulrich Beppler is made of concrete. 

There is also a stone wall with a quote by Julius Fučík, a Czech resistance fighter who was executed in 1943: ‘Mankind, we loved you – Be vigilant’. 55 members of the resistance from Hamburg have now been laid to rest here.