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Südwestkirchhof Stahnsdorf
Südwestkirchhof Stahnsdorf
	Designated landmark wooden chapel of the Southwest Cemetery in Stahnsdorf
Details
Established	1909
Location	Stahnsdorf
Country	Germany
Coordinates	52°23′20″N 13°10′50″E / 52.388889°N 13.180556°E
Type	Protestant cemetery
Owned by	Evangelical Church in Berlin, Brandenburg and Silesian Upper Lusatia
Size	206 ha
No. of interments	+120,000
Website	The official website
Find a Grave	Südwestkirchhof Stahnsdorf

The Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery (German: Südwestfriedhof Stahnsdorf der Berliner Synode) is a Protestant rural cemetery in Germany. Established in 1909, the cemetery is located in the municipality of Stahnsdorf in Potsdam-Mittelmark district, Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. With a land area of approximately 206 ha, it is the largest church-owned Christian cemetery in Germany, as well as being the tenth largest cemetery in the world and Germany's second largest cemetery after Hamburg's Ohlsdorf Cemetery.^[1] The cemetery is operated by the administration of the Berlin City Protestant Synod Association.^[2] Due to its status as one of the most important landscape parks in the Berlin metropolitan area, along with the large amount of historically valuable tombs and other buildings which include the landmark wooden chapel, the cemetery was designated as a place of special importance and a protected area by the state of Brandenburg in 1982.

History and description

In the second half of the 19th century, it became clear that due to industrialization, Berlin's population growth would eventually increase to such an extent that the existing Protestant parish burial grounds would prove to be insufficient to cope with the increasing mortality rates. It was decided by Berlin City Synodal Association, comprising parishes of the Protestant Church of the older provinces of Prussia in Berlin and the surrounding area, that a large cemetery on the outskirts should have to be established and finally acquired a large piece of land outside the city limits which included an area of around 156 hectares in size, partly covered with pine trees in a wooded area, in the southwest of Berlin, between the Parforceheide forests in the north and west, the new Potsdamer Landstrasse in the south and the municipality of Stahnsdorf in the east. The cemetery was consecrated on March 28, 1909, and the first burial took place on April 8; a retired teacher named Elisabeth Wenzlewski. The landmark wooden cemetery chapel, modeled on Norwegian stave churches, was built between 1908 and 1911 according to plans by the church architect Gustav Werner. The wooden interior houses Art Nouveau stained glass windows and a pipe organ built by Wilhelm Sauer. The chapel is still used for funerals and church services and it occasionally hosts musical events.^[3] In 1928, a railway built between Wannsee and Stahnsdorf, and a special train station was inaugurated on the forecourt of the cemetery for the purpose of transporting the coffins, along with the mourners, families of the deceased and visitors. The so-called cemetery railway was colloquially referred to as the widow railway. Around 33,000 graves were exhumed from the six Schöneberg parish cemeteries and transferred along with tombstones to Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery.^[4] The newly created cemetery was one of the first examples of the popular rural cemetery movement in Germany, along with the Ohlsdorf Cemetery of Hamburg which is non-denominational and not affiliated with any church. In the first 25 years of its operation, the Südwestfriedhof received more than 35,000 interments which is almost a third of the approximately 120,000 burials recorded to date. Although the burial area was primarily intended for the burial of the deceased of those professing the Protestant faith, with each one of the twenty-one Protestant parishes having their own plots, a separate nonsectarian part was set up by the municipal authorities for the burial of other religious communities and non-religious citizens. In addition to the non-denominational municipal blocks within the cemetery, the non-sectarian Friedenauer Waldfriedhof (Forest-cemetery of Friedenau) which has been called Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof Güterfelde since 1935, was opened in 1913 and then another non-denominational cemetery to the north was inaugurated in 1921 to accommodate non-sectarian burials in a secular setting. Due to the construction of Berlin Wall in 1961, the railway ceased to operate and the cemetery lost its main function as a central cemetery to serve Berlin metropolitan region, after it had been detached from its primary service area. To maintain and preserve the large cemetery under the difficult environment of a politically and geographically divided Berlin in the post-war period has always been a priority of the Evangelical Church in Berlin, Brandenburg and Silesian Upper Lusatia. Since 1991, the Protestant Church invested more than 6 million Euros for the conservation of cemetery site and associated facilities, along with the rehabilitation of the chapel, funerary monuments and mausoleums.^[5]

List of parish burial blocks located on Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery

The burial grounds of the individual Protestant parishes are called blocks. In addition to the blocks of the parishes, there are also special blocks that were created later for war graves and reburials (see below). Many of the parishes listed here have now merged with neighboring parishes under new names.^[6]

Old Reburial Block: Lot of Evangelical Lutheran parish of St. Matthew's Church in Berlin-Tiergarten which contains graves that were relocated to Stahnsdorf from the old parish burial ground.
Charlottenburg Block: Non-denominational municipal section for the burial of those who reside in Charlottenburg district of Berlin, regardless of religious affiliation.
Chapel block: A row of graves in front of the cemetery chapel, including the grave of architect Gustav Werner who built the chapel.
Epiphany (Epiphanien) Block: Lot of Evangelical Lutheran parish of Epiphany Church in Westend.
Redeemer (Erlöser) Block: Lot of Evangelical Lutheran parish of the Redeemer Church, reburials from the crypts of the Berlin Garrison Church (1949) and from abandoned parts of the Old Garrison Cemetery in Berlin-Mitte.
Gustav-Adolf Block: Lot of Protestant parish of the Gustav-Adolf Church in northern Charlottenburg.
Holy Spirit (Heilig Geist) Block: Lot of Evangelical Lutheran parish of the Holy Spirit Church in Moabit, including Heroes' Block: War graves of fallen German soldiers from First World War.
Lietzensee Block: Lot of Protestant parish of Witzleben church in Berlin-Witzleben.
Nathanael Block: Lot of Protestant parish of the Nathanael Church in Schöneberg.
Reformation Block: Lot of Evangelical Lutheran parish of the Reformation Church in Moabit.
Schöneberg Block I and II: Non-denominational municipal section for the burial of those who reside in Schöneberg district of Berlin, regardless of religious affiliation.
Swedish cemetery: Lot of Swedish Lutheran Victoria Community in Wilmersdorf.
Sisters' Block: Burial site of Lutheran St. Elisabeth deaconesses.
Stahnsdorf Block: Non-denominational municipal section for the burial of those who reside in Stahnsdorf, regardless of religious affiliation.
Trinity (Trinitatis) Block: Lot of Evangelical Lutheran parish of the Holy Trinity Church in Charlottenburg.
Urnhain I, II, III: Urn interment fields for those who opted for cremation.

World War graves

After the First World War, the British and Italian governments acquired areas within the South-Western Cemetery in order to set up honorary cemeteries for their military personnel who perished during the First World War. The two military cemeteries, each approximately one hectare in size, have been preserved to this day. The British Commonwealth South-Western Cemetery contains a total of 1,177 burials and the Italian one around 1,650 interments. A memorial to the German soldiers who died in the First World War was erected in the South-Western Cemetery. British military graves are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which registered the cemetery as Berlin South-Western Cemetery.^[7] Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom paid a visit to South-Western Cemetery on November 3, 2004 to commemorate those who died in the First World War at the British military cemetery on the occasion of her state visit to Germany.^[8]

Flora and fauna

Apart from its architectural and historic importance, the cemetery ground serves as a home to many animal species, which includes over 40 species of birds, 200 species of butterflies and over 300 species of insects, with some of those endangered that are threatened by extinction. Four different bat species live in the crypts and mausoleums. There are also over 200,000 trees on the site, along with different species of shrubs, bushes and flowers. ^[9]

In popular culture

The gothic setting of the burial ground and grave monuments in the attractive forest-like landscape has made the Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery a backdrop for film shoots on various occasions, particularly the area around the chapel and the mausoleum of the Caspary family.

In March 2009, Roman Polanski filmed a scene for The Ghostwriter, starring Ewan McGregor and Tom Wilkinson, in a remote area of the Lietzensee block in the cemetery.
Julian Rosefeldt shot the eulogy scene of his movie Manifesto at the South-Western Cemetery with Cate Blanchett starring as the funeral speaker.^[10]
The cemetery chapel was also used as a filming location in Dark; a German science fiction thriller television series released on Netflix in 2017.

Notable burials, including re-burials from Berlin parish burial grounds

List is sorted in order of the year of death.

Adolf Bernhard Marx (1795–1866), music theorist, critic, and musicologist
Richard Lucae (1829–1877), architect
August Krönig (1822–1879), chemist and physicist
Gustav Reichardt (1797–1884), music teacher and composer
Johann Georg Meyer (1813–1886), commonly known as Meyer von Bremen, painter
Jean Lulvès (1833–1889), Franco-German painter
Alexander von Monts (1832-1889), officer in the Prussian Navy and later the German Imperial Navy
Werner von Siemens (1816–1892), electrical engineer, inventor and industrialist
Gustav Langenscheidt (1832–1895), book publisher, and the founder of Langenscheidt Publishing Group
Fedor Jagor (1816–1900), ethnologist, naturalist and explorer
Hedwig Raabe (1844–1905), actress
Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), polymath
Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905), traveller, geographer, and scientist
Wilhelm von Bezold (1837-1907), physicist and meteorologist
Bernhard Plockhorst (1825– 1907), painter and graphic artist
Eberhard Schrader (1836–1908), orientalist
August Meitzen (1822-1910), statistician
Carl Anton Ewald (1845–1915), gastroenterologist
August Stramm (1874–1915), war poet and playwright
Georg Jochmann (1874–1915), internist and bacteriologist
Eduard Sonnenburg (1848–1915), surgeon
Christian Luerssen (1843–1916), botanist
Dorrit Weixler (1892–1916), actress
Albert Eulenburg (1840–1917), neurologist
Albert Niemann (tenor) (1831-1917), operatic heldentenor especially associated with the operas of Richard Wagner
Adelsteen Normann (1848–1918), Norwegian painter
Johannes Kaempf (1842–1918), liberal politician and banker
Reinhold Felderhoff (1865–1919), sculptor
Gilda Langer (1896–1920), stage and film actress
Engelbert Humperdinck (composer) (1854–1921), composer
Hugo Conwentz (1855–1922), botanist
Carl Ludwig Schleich (1859–1922), surgeon and writer
Carl Harries (1866–1923), chemist
Emanuel Reicher (1849–1924), actor
Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), artist and writer
Karl Hilgers (1844–1925), sculptor
Wilhelm Kuhnert (1865–1926), painter, author and illustrator
Karl Holl (1866–1926), professor of Lutheran theology and church history at Tübingen
Richard Eilenberg (1848–1927), composer
Erich Kaiser-Titz (1875–1928), stage and film actor
Heinrich Zille (1858–1929), illustrator, caricaturist, lithographer and photographer
Meta Seinemeyer (1895–1929), opera singer
Otto Taubmann (1859–1929), composer and conductor
Hans Moldenhauer (1901–1929), Germany's first major international tennis player
Oskar Kanehl (1888–1929), poet
Emil Krebs (1867–1930), polyglot and sinologist
F. W. Murnau (1888–1931), film director, producer, and screenwriter
Theodor Wedepohl (1863–1931), portrait, landscape and genre painter
Hans Wassmann (1873–1932), actor
Ernst Kromayer (1862–1933), dermatologist
Max Adalbert (1874–1933), stage and film actor
Lola Artôt de Padilla (1880-1933), French-Spanish soprano
Franz Bracht (1877–1933), jurist and politician
Oskar Fleischer (1856–1933), musicologist
Willem Kes (1856–1934), Dutch conductor, composer, violist, and violinist
Alexander von Kluck (1846–1934), general during World War I
Wilhelm Diegelmann (1861–1934), actor
Hugo Rüdel (1868–1934), choir director and conductor
Max Friedlaender (musicologist) (1852–1934), bass singer, music editor, and musicologist
Siegfried Seidel-Dittmarsch (1887–1934), Nazi Party politician and SS-Gruppenführer
Karl Ludwig Manzel (1858–1936), sculptor and painter
Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski (1873–1936), writer, translator, publisher and cultural historian
Rudolf Bosselt (1871–1938), sculptor
Erna Denera (1881–1938), operatic soprano and voice teacher
Ernst Gennat (1880–1939), director of the Berlin criminal police
Wilhelm Groener (1867–1939), general and politician
Magnus von Levetzow (1871–1939), naval officer who rose to the rank of Konteradmiral
Willy Hess (violinist) (1859–1939), violinist and violin teacher
Georg von Arco (1869–1940), physicist, radio pioneer, and one of the joint founders of the "Society for Wireless Telegraphy" which became the Telefunken company
August Borchard (1864–1940), physician and surgeon
Ralph Arthur Roberts (1884–1940), actor
Wilhelm Guttmann (1886–1941), composer
Friedrich Mallinckrodt (1894–1941), World War I test pilot and flying ace credited with six aerial victories
Carl Friedrich von Siemens (1872–1941), entrepreneur and politician, a member of the Siemens family
Joachim Gottschalk (1904–1941), stage and film actor
Adolf Gottstein (1857–1941), social hygienist and epidemiologist
Hugo Distler (1908–1942), organist, choral conductor and composer
Emmy Wyda (1876–1942), actress
Rudolf Breitscheid (1874–1944), politician
Max de Crinis (1889–1945), psychiatrist
Friedrich Paschen (1865-1947), physicist
Kurt Feldt (1897–1970), general in the Wehrmacht
Jean Kurt Forest (1909–1975), violist, Kapellmeister and composer
Hannjo Hasse (1921–1983), actor
Otto Graf Lambsdorff (1926–2009), politician
Maja Maranow (1961–2016), actress
Manfred Krug (1937–2016), actor, singer and author
Dieter Thomas Heck (1937–2018), television presenter, singer and actor
Jürgen Holtz (1932–2020), actor
Thomas Gumpert (1952–2021), actor