On April 19, 1945, a freight train with nearly 4,500 prisoners from Buchenwald pulled onto the railroad siding at Nammering. The commanding officer in charge, Lieutenant Hans Meerbach, ordered during the halt that the bodies of the dead be removed from the train and cremated. This work proceeded too slowly for him, however, and prisoners were forced to carry the bodies of the dead to a nearby mass grave where they were shot by the guards and then also buried in the grave. Altogether 524 prisoners were shot and nearly 800 were interred in the mass grave. 

After the discovery of the site by U.S. troops on April 28, the ranking American officer in the area forced SS men collected from a nearby POW camp to exhume the corpses and lay them out on either side of the ravine above the mass grave. The inhabitants of Nammering were then ordered to walk through the gravesite, and the bodies were buried in the surrounding towns of Eging am See, Aicha vom Wald, Nammering, and Fuerstenstein.