Given that Karl Marx's grave is in London's Highgate Cemetery, and has been since his death in 1883, it was difficult for the Nazis to do anything to his grave. The closest they came to destroying it or damaging it was during the Blitz of London. Highgate, in the leafy suburbs of North London, was far from the main German targets: the docks of the East End, and the aircraft factories around the south and west of the city. However, bombing accuracy and navigation was poor, on both sides of the war, and it was not uncommon for bombers to wander. Between the 7th October 1940 and the 6th June 1941, a total of 6 bombs fell in and around the cemetery. While some of these did fall quite close to his grave (within 100m), none damaged it. In the post-war period, there were a couple of attempts to bomb the grave. In 1965, the Metropolitan Police received an anonymous tip-off that the grave was going to be destroyed, giving them enough warning to discover an improvised explosive device. In 1970, bombers attempted to saw off the nose of the statue that tops the grave, fill the head cavity with explosives, and detonate it. This was foiled when they discovered that the nose was completely solid, so the explosives were detonated next to the grave, though the bomb did less damage than the hacksaw they'd used to cut his nose off.

There was nothing the Nazis could do because Marx's grave is in the UK in London's Highgate Cemetery. The Soviet regime had asked for Marx's body in 1922, but the British Home Office refused the request. The initial grave was a modest affair, but in 1954, the cemetery's officials secretly reburied Marx's corpse- after getting approval from three of Marx's decedents- to the more ornate grave that exists today. The Communist Party of Great Britain paid for the granite gravemarker and bust and it has been one of the tourist attractions for Highgate. The cemetery has recently started charging admission, an irony not lost on conservative-leaning outlets like the Wall Street Journal- and to be fair to Highgate, most of the articles imply the admission is for Marx's grave, which is incorrect. Admission is for the whole cemetery and there are other luminaries buried there besides Marx such as the great Douglas Adams.

The grave has been the subject of periodic vandalism since the 1920s. In the aftermath of the Eichmann trial, some vandals have daubed "I love Eichmann" and swastikas have also been a common form of vandalism. There was more serious form of vandalism in 1970 when in which vandals tried cut open the bust's nose and fill it with homemade explosives. The solid bust foiled the attempt, so they detonated the explosives outside the memorial, causing significant, but reparable, damage to the monument and the surrounding graves. Vandalism and other forms of disrespect are quite common for the grave, but it is one of the main highlights of Highgate and Marx's bust features prominently on their promotional materials.