Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery

Brandenburg · Germany · Cemetery

Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery — Brandenburg · Germany · Cemetery

Visitors meet figures among the graves at dusk — here lie 15,000 dead dug up in Berlin and carried out on the corpse railway.

Südwestkirchhof in Stahnsdorf is a forest necropolis of over 200 hectares of pine, where ivy has swallowed whole quarters and Jugendstil mausoleums show between the trunks. Visitors report again and again figures moving between the stones at dusk that dissolve as you walk towards them, and in the copy of a Norwegian stave church that serves as its chapel time seems to have stopped. The reputation is not hard to explain. The cemetery was consecrated in 1909 so far from Berlin that its own railway had to be built — Berliners named it the Leichenbahn, the corpse railway, and special funeral trains carried coffins and mourners from Wannsee straight onto the grounds. In the 1930s some 15,000 graves were dug up in Schöneberg and moved here. The new quarters of the dead are still called the old and the new rebedding.

FAQ

Where is Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery located?

Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery is in Brandenburg, Germany.

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Image: Anagoria · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons