Originally opened in 1909 as a graveyard for the poor and indigent of Berlin’s eastern suburbs, this garden-style cemetery soon became the final resting place for many who paid the ultimate price during the wars and revolutions of the 20th century. While the park still serves the burial needs of local residents, much of the cemetery ground is devoted to diverse, and sometimes contradictory memorials to the victims of Central European history.
Those with monuments and places of honor in the cemetery include German soldiers killed in the First World War, Fritz and Albert Gast (two communist sailors killed by rightists in 1919), twenty Polish women killed while serving as forced laborers for the Nazis, 3,330 Berliners killed in the WWII Allied bombing campaigns, Sinti and Roma victims of Nazi extermination policies, 125 Soviet soldiers killed fighting against the Axis powers, Italian soldiers fallen while fighting for the Axis powers, and German postwar victims of the Stalin regime.
History makes strange bedfellows indeed.
- Wiesenburger Weg 10
- 12681 Berlin
- Jan-Apr, 8:00-18:00; May-Sep, 7:00-21:00; Oct-Dec, 8:00-18:00
- +49309329295
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Olympic Memories The XIth Olympiad in Berlin
In preparation for the Olympic Games in August, on July 16, 1936 the German authorities rounded up Berlin's Sinti and Roma population, interning them in a concentration camp on the northern edge of this cemetery. Over 800 men, women and children were interned in the camp, the first created exclusively to house victims of Nazi racial policies. Most would later be deported to Auschwitz, only a handful surviving their ordeal. Their suffering is remembered by a memorial erected in the cemetery.
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