The microscopic remains of political prisoners executed by the Nazis and dissected by a controversial anatomist are to be buried in Berlin on Monday, more than seven decades after the end of the second world war.

About 300 tissue samples, each one no more than a hundredth of a millimetre thin and one square centimetre in size, were discovered in 2016 by descendants of Hermann Stieve, a former director of the Berlin Institute of Anatomy who specialised in research into the female reproductive system.

Though Stieve was not a member of the Nazi party, he developed a relationship with the regime whereby he was allowed to do research on recently executed political prisoners in return for helping to obliterate any traces of their remains.

Stieve was particularly interested in obtaining the bodies of “abruptly” deceased women.

The nearby Plötzensee prison, where more than 2,800 people were put to the guillotine or hanged between 1933 and 1945, was able to meet Stieve’s demand for what he described in a 1938 letter to the Nazi health minister as “raw material of the kind possessed by no other institute in the world”.

The bodies were picked up by car and sometimes ended up on Stieve’s operating table as soon as 15 minutes after death. Apart from the tissue samples, the bodies were immediately cremated and buried in anonymous graves.

Stieve’s own autopsy records list 184 names, 172 of them women.

Between 1942 and 1943, the Nazis murdered 42 resistance fighters from the Red Orchestra, an anti-Nazi group formed around the Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen, the writer Adam Kuckhoff and the economist Arvid Harnack. Stieve dissected the bodies of 13 of the 18 female members of the group executed in this period, among them the leader’s wife, Libertas Schulze-Boysen.

Hermann Stieve was never prosecuted and continued his career as a scientist in the Soviet-administered East Germany until he died of a stroke in 1952.

The remains will be buried at the Dorotheenstadt cemetery, in Berlin, at 3pm on Monday. Photograph: Alamy

Andreas Winkelmann, a professor of anatomy at Brandenburg Medical School in Neuruppin, who was tasked with determining the origin of the samples, told AFP that such microscopic tissue samples were usually not deemed worthy of burial.

“But this is a special story, because they came from people who were actively denied graves so that their relatives would not know where they are buried.”

The Dorotheenstadt cemetery, in central Berlin, where the remains of the political prisoners will be laid to rest at 3pm on Monday, is also home to the graves of the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the novelist Heinrich Mann and the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as well as a number of prominent anti-Nazi resistance fighters.

As part of a ceremony conducted by a Catholic priest, a Protestant pastor and a rabbi, a small sarcophagus containing the remains will be lowered into a grave adjacent to a stone block that commemorates the men involved in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944.

Johannes Tuchel, the director of the German Resistance Memorial Centre, which is organising the special event with the Charité hospital, told the Guardian that, respecting the wishes of some of the victims’ descendants, no names would be listed either during the ceremony or on the commemorative plaque fixed to the grave.

• This article was amended on 13 May 2019 to correct the details of Andreas Winkelmann’s place of work; he is a professor of anatomy at Brandenburg Medical School in Neuruppin, not Charité university hospital in Berlin.