An elaborate dome of polished red granite rises imposingly out of the quiet leafy landscape near the center of the Jüdischer Friedhof Berlin-Weißensee.

With a form based on the design of ancient Roman Jewish temples, it features a pyramid-shaped spire with an openwork Star of David. 

Built between 1903 and 1904 for the wife of Berlin merchant Sigmund Aschrott, it is the largest mausoleum in the cemetery. 

But it is by no means alone in its grandeur.

Nearby, other massive granite and marble monuments mark the resting places of prominent Berliners of the late 19th and early 20th century - the mausoleum for Adolf Jadorf, the founder of the Kaufhaus des Westens, and his family; the wine merchant, Berthold Kempinski, rests underneath an intricately carved limestone wall, while newspaper publisher Rudolf Mosse and family are also remembered with a marble and red granite mausoleum.

Smaller, yet equally detailed monuments mark the graves of notables like painter Lesser Ury and the writer and state legislator, Stefan Heym. They are among the more than 116,000 graves in the entire cemetery, which is still in use today.

Establishing a cemetery and burial ground is an essential task for any Jewish community, notes Nirit Ben-Joseph, an Israeli filmmaker and tour guide who has called Berlin home since 1987.

Traditional Jewish law mandates that a person’s body be buried within 24 hours of death. Faced with discrimination and hostility in many places where they have lived or immigrated, Jewish people have always deemed it necessary to ensure they have a place to safely bury their loved ones in accordance with Jewish laws and customs.

The cemetery in Weissensee opened in 1880, after the original cemetery on Großer Hamburger Straße and then a second one on Schönhauser Allee filled up and were closed to new burials.

Community elders came together to purchase 43 hectares of land (roughly 100 acres) in what was then a sparsely populated wooded village northeast of Berlin.

Although it was far from the heart of Jewish life in the center of the city - they had enough land to build what the rapidly growing community needed.

On the site, they constructed a mortuary, a mourning hall, a residence and administrative building for the cemetery inspector, a porter’s residence and a massive enclosure, complete with an entrance building and wrought iron cemetery gate.

The winner of the competition held to choose the cemetery’s design was architect Hugo Licht, later to become the city building councilor for the city of Leipzig.

A cultural history

The monuments in Weissensee do more than memorialize individual people, Ben-Joseph says. They are an important window and historical record of the Jewish community as it existed and flourished at the dawn of the 20th century in Berlin.

By 1880, when the cemetery opened, there were more than 65,000 Jewish people living in Berlin, descendants of just 50 families that had been recruited in 1671 by Friedrich Wilhelm, the Elector of Brandenburg, to help rebuild the city at the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

By the 1930s, the Jewish community had grown to 160,000 people. 

Tracing the evolution of the community via the older headstones in Hebrew to spelling Hebrew words with German letters, then later written completely in German - as well as using more traditionally German and Christian architectural styles and memorial customs.

The Jews in Berlin were becoming completely integrated into German society - they included captains of industry, business leaders, academics, government officials, poets and artists. The exquisite monuments in Weißensee were often designed by leading architects.

The outbreak of World War I saw 100,000 Jewish soldiers serve in the army of the German Empire - 12,000 of them were killed in action. 

A Field of Honor just behind the location of the former mourning hall contains the graves of 394 of these soldiers. Because the families of many of them were murdered or driven away during the Nazi regime, the German War Graves Commission (German: Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge) assumed responsibility for restoring and maintaining the graves following German reunification. And, every year, on Armistice Day, a group of active duty service members hold a memorial service there and lay wreaths.

“I have been here guiding family members [looking for the grave of a relative], who were shocked and rather frightened to see a group of soldiers,” says Ben-Joseph. “And, I tell them that they come here to maintain the veterans’ graves regularly.”

How it survived

When the National Socialists took power in 1933, Jewish people in Germany became increasingly restricted. They were driven out of government, had their companies seized and aryanized, and were forbidden to hold certain jobs. Schoolchildren were forced to attend separate schools for Jews.

Thousands of Jewish Berliners, along with other German Jews, emigrated to other countries to avoid persecution. But many - either by choice or because they could not leave - remained.

In 1942, the Gestapo seized the Jewish Home for the Aged, which adjoined the Old Jewish Cemetery on Großer Hamburger Straße, and turned it into a holding camp for Jewish people before they were deported to concentration camps further east.

The next year, German authorities destroyed the old cemetery, digging up the graves, removing the bodies and smashing the headstones. In 1945, several mass graves were dug in the former old cemetery to hold the bodies of over 2,400 people killed in Berlin during World War II.

The smaller cemetery on Schönhauser Allee was largely left alone, save for serving as the site of execution for German army deserters who attempted to hide in one of the cisterns during the last days of the war.

The Jewish Cemetery of Weißensee became a haven for Jewish people who increasingly had nowhere to go. Some chose to avoid deportation orders and go into hiding on the vast grounds.

And it remained in operation as a cemetery, thanks to the efforts of caretaker Martin Riesenburger. A rabbi who had been working at the senior citizens’ home before the war, Riesenburger was arrested in 1941, but then released because he was in a mixed marriage - his wife was a German Christian.

He was put in charge of maintaining the cemetery and he remained there, performing burial rites for the Jews who remained in Berlin.

Why the Nazis left the Weißensee cemetery alone, when they went to such lengths to destroy the community is hard to say, Ben-Joseph notes. Part of the explanation is practical.

“Why expend energy to junt Jews who are already dead?” she asks wryly. 

The presence of the graves of the World War veterans may have been another reason. The Nazi regime glorified military service and still had to carefully manage its grip on public sentiment. Desecrating the graves of recent war dead - even Jewish ones - might have been a bridge too far, she adds.

Graves for the missing

At the entrance to the cemetery stands a circular memorial to the victims of National Socialism. Arranged in a circle are 20 plaques bearing the names of the principal concentration and death camps. An urn containing the ashes of Jews murdered at Auschwitz was interred in front of the memorial stone on January 27, 1992.

In some cases, the ashes of people killed in the camps were sent back to their relatives in Berlin - who had to pay cash on delivery to receive them - and interred in the cemetery here. But for the vast majority of victims, there was no body to bury.

Many of the funeral monuments for survivors of the Holocaust also list their relatives who were lost - parents’ headstones list also their murdered children, children their parents, husbands’ their wives, surviving siblings list their brothers and sisters.

The father of writer Kurt Tucholsky, Alex Tucholsky, died in 1905 in Berlin and was buried in a grave at Weißensee. Next to his monument is also one for his wife, Kurt’s mother, Doris Tucholsky, who was deported from Berlin to Theresienstadt on an Alterstransport (deportation of senior citizens) in July of 1942. She was murdered there in May 1943.

After the war, the cemetery - like most of the rest of the city - was badly damaged. The second mourning hall in the middle of the property was completely destroyed. 

The division of the city in 1961 during the Cold War left the cemetery in the hands of a very small number of Jewish residents, who were not able to repair the damage or keep up maintenance.

The community then decided to maintain only a small section of the cemetery near the entrance, to allow for continued burials.

A renewal

Following German reunification in 1990, a somewhat larger Jewish community began the task of fully repairing the damaged and neglected graves and landscape.They have received some assistance from the German government, but much work is still to be done.

Traditionally, gravesites are maintained by the family and descendants of the deceased. But the Holocaust eliminated entire family lines. For many of the graves, there is no one left.

Today, there are an estimated 30,000 Jewish people living in Berlin. Many emigrated from the former Soviet Union to make the German capital their home. But others of German ancestry have also returned to reclaim the capital as their own.

The cemetery in Weißensee is an important link to their history.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated in the headline that Weißensee is in the northwest corner of Berlin. This is incorrect. It is in the northeast of Berlin. The error has been corrected.

More about the Jewish Cemetery in Weißensee

Im Himmel, Unter der Erde is a 2011 documentary film by Britta Wauer about the cemetery.

Jüdische Gemeinde Berlin: Weißensee Cemetery - Information about the cemetery at the homepage of the Jewish Association of Berlin.

Förderverein Jüdischer Friedhof Berlin-Weißensee - The support association of the Jewish Cemetery of Weißensee.

TIC: Kultur und Tourismusmarketing Berlin-Weißensee: Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee

More about Jewish history in Berlin

Jewish Community of Berlin: A Timeline of Jewish HIstory in Berlin

Holocaust Encyclopedia: The Jewish Community of Berlin

Deutsche Welle: How German Jews Rebuilt after the Holocaust

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