The hard work and often inadequate living conditions led to a steadily rising death rate.

In the early years, the dead were laid to rest in the village and church cemeteries or in the Westerholz cemetery. The construction of a central "foreigners' cemetery" began in the early summer of 1943, with the Reichswerke "Hermann-Göring" providing the site with the old field name Jammertal. The area was a small hill in the otherwise flat landscape, as the unusable earth from the construction work had been dumped there.

The cemetery area is divided into a coordinate system - into fields, grave rows and grave numbers. Burials mostly took place in individual graves, the grave location was recorded on index cards so that the graves can still be located today. In total, around 4000 victims from more than 15 nations were buried. Until 1951, all "foreigners" had to be buried in the Jammertal cemetery.

There were reburials in the 1950s: On the one hand to the victims' home countries or to central Ehrenfeld cemeteries in Hanover and Hamburg, on the other hand foreign war dead were reburied from the small cemeteries in the Salzgitter area to the Jammertal cemetery.

In the course of 1946, the appearance of the cemetery changed. Paths were created and in September the Allies erected a memorial in the center of the area. Around the same time, an obelisk for the Soviet victims was erected at the rear of the cemetery. This was followed in 1948 by an obelisk for the Jewish victims and a memorial for Polish victims. A year later, the former concentration camp prisoner Abbot Carlotti dedicated a cross in memory of the French concentration camp prisoners who had died in Salzgitter. There were only a few graves with individual headstones.

The current design of the cemetery dates back to the 1970s. At that time, five memorial stones were erected at the entrance and the entrance to the cemetery was aligned with them. For maintenance reasons, all individual grave markers were removed and metal plaques with first names and surnames, birth and death dates, based on the grave coordinates, were set into the ground instead. However, not for all graves, so that today some grave areas are not marked. In November 2011, eight lecterns were installed at the entrance to the cemetery. In addition to information about the history of the site, there are also five metal books in which all the names of the victims known to date are listed for the first time. Visitors can find the graves using the coordinate system and a cemetery map.

The Jammertal cemetery is a special place of remembrance in Salzgitter.