In the final days of the European theater of World War II, German civilian residents of Nameringen were forced to bury the bodies of 800 victims killed three weeks earlier in a massacre carried out by German SS units. The bodies had been left exposed for five days. The burials were ordered by the American military administration.
On April 19, 1945, a freight train carrying approximately 4,500 prisoners from Buchenwald stopped at a siding in Namerling. The train had been scheduled for Dachau but was diverted toward Namerling at Plattling due to track damage from Allied bombing. After arriving at Namerling, some local residents attempted to give the prisoners food and water, but these were seized by the 150 SS guards and police officers escorting the train.
German commander Lieutenant Hans Meerbach ordered the corpses removed from the train and cremated during the stop. However, judging the work too slow, he ordered the prisoners to carry the bodies to a mass grave in a ravine about 500 yards away. There, the prisoners transporting the bodies were shot by guards, and the prisoners themselves were buried in the grave. A total of 524 prisoners were shot, and about 800 were buried in the mass grave. The bodies were covered with lime, and the grave was flooded to accelerate decomposition. The 3,100 prisoners remaining on the train were transported to Dachau, where they were liberated. After American forces discovered the site at Namerling on April 28, the local American commander ordered SS men assembled from a nearby concentration camp to exhume the bodies and line them up along both sides of the ravine above the mass grave. Subsequently, the residents of Namerling were forced to walk past the graves, and the bodies were buried in the towns of Egging am See, Eichach am Wald, Namerling, and Fürstenstein surrounding Namerling. (DPLA: Digital Public Library of America, https://dp.la/)
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