By 1953, though, the matter of the Hameln graves reached new proportions. By this time, the Federal Republic had gained sovereignty, and control of Hameln prison was handed back to the Germans. A series of sensationalist articles then appeared in the West German press, all apparently ‘exposing’ the fact that German nationals had been executed and buried in this town. […] it was treated as the discovery of a major scandal. Numerous articles stressed the clandestine nature of these burials, and the fact relatives had been denied the right to mourn the dead at a proper, marked graveside. The popular weekly, Illustrierte Post, for example, sensationalised the fact that the tending of these sites in any form had been strictly forbidden and described how any flowers that were delicately placed in the vicinity were cruelly thrown away by the British staff.

While such articles repeatedly implied that the British had behaved in a cruel, callous or inhumane manner, the [Axis] perpetrators were treated in a far more sympathetic manner. The press routinely used inverted commas around the term ‘war criminal’, implicitly casting doubt on their involvement in [Axis] atrocities. The Illustrierte Post referred to the dead as ‘political detainees’, while both the tabloid Bild Zeitung and the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung used the term ‘survivors’ to refer to those war criminals who had been transferred from Hameln to another prison. The corpses, then, were portrayed as victims of defeat, occupation and victors’ justice — a sentiment that fitted into wider currents of German victimhood that circulated in the immediate post-war era. Bild-Zeitung labelled the prison burial ground a ‘Yard of Horror’, while at the most extreme, ‘news’ of the Hameln bodies was presented as the equivalent of the discovery of the Katyn massacre, suggesting that the effects of Josef Goebbels’s wartime propaganda still held some resonance for elements of the German population. At no point in these articles was there any meaningful engagement with the crimes these [anticommunists] had committed.

(Emphasis added.)

Additionally:

Regardless of the public and political protest, the reburial of the Hameln executed war criminals was carried out in 1954 and the cemetery subsequently became a focal point for [anticommunist] rallies and veterans’ reunions. In September 1959, for example, a meeting of the HIAG (Mutual Help Association of Former Waffen-SS Members) attracted a crowd of 15,000 people including Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich, a highly decorated former Waffen-SS general who had previously been convicted by both US Military Tribunal and the Landgericht Munich for war crimes; the event concluded with comrades gathering around the tomb of Bernhard Siebken who, like Dietrich, had been a member of Hitler’s personal bodyguard. Further controversy ensued in 1985 when the site witnessed demonstrations by the [anticommunist] Free German Workers’ Party (FAP). Yet interest in the executed criminal corpses was not confined to Far-Right extremists. On the contrary, between 1975 and 1986, a voluntary Bürgerinitiative (literally, citizens’ initiative) was established specifically to tend and maintain the graves, underscoring the persistence of competing, local memories of the war years.

Further reading: What do you do with a Dead Nazi? Allied Policy on the Execution and Disposal of War Criminals, 1945–55.