Cemetery at Kettwiger Tor

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Krupp family cemetery around 1900, view from the main train station ; on the left the tomb of Alfred Krupp , on the right that of his wife Bertha Krupp nee. Eichhoff

The former municipal cemetery at Kettwiger Tor was located between 1827 and 1955 south of the former Essen city ​​wall in front of its Kettwiger Tor . Among other things, important personalities from Essen, including members of the industrial families Krupp and Waldthausen , were buried here.

history

Memorial stone in the east cemetery to the buried clergy in front of the Kettwig gate
Memorial column, originally a tomb of the Waldthausen family , on the Ostfriedhof Essen - inscription: Many Essen families found a new resting place here in 1955 after the cemetery was relocated at Kettwiger Tor. They established Essen's rise to the big city

origin

The cemetery at Kettwiger Tor was established in 1827 as the first communal cemetery in the city of Essen outside its city wall. Compared to today's development, it was about the freedom in front of the main train station .

The Catholic cemetery on the northern part of today's Burgplatz was abandoned in 1827 and moved to the cemetery at Kettwiger Tor in 1830; likewise the old evangelical cemetery on Weberstrasse. Along the outer walls and the central transverse axis of the cemetery at Kettwiger Tor outside the city wall, there were family tombs with hereditary burials of the long-established, sometimes important Essen bourgeoisie . In 1849 the cemetery was expanded.

Next to the public entrance gate on Kettwiger Chaussee, today's Huyssenallee, the Catholic clergy was on the right and the Protestant clergy on the left. The Catholic area with individual graves and a communal grave was larger than the Protestant area, which only consisted of individual graves. On the Protestant side was u. a. Pastor Friedrich Laar buried in 1827; this was the first burial in the new cemetery.

Krupp family cemetery

From 1887, with the death of the industrialist Alfred Krupps , the Krupp private cemetery in the east was incorporated into the communal cemetery. This was laid out like a park and was spatially separated from the communal cemetery by a wall and a lockable gate. From today's perspective, parts of it are covered by the parking garage on the south side of the main train station.

The northern part of the cemetery at Kettwiger Tor on what was then Hohenburgstrasse had to be abandoned in the 1910s due to the expansion of the southern station forecourt of the rapidly expanding Essen city center, due to the high immigration of workers for the mining and steel industry . Therese Krupp, born in 1860, had to go from here . Wilhelmi, the widow of the company founder Friedrich Krupp , to be reburied to freedom.

Furthermore, Alfred Krupp and his wife Bertha (née Eichhoff), their son Friedrich Alfred Krupp and his wife Margarethe as well as the great-grandsons of Alfred, Claus and Arnold von Bohlen and Halbach were buried in the private cemetery .

Closure and relocation

In 1955, the cemetery was finally completely abandoned because of the beginning of the new construction of the Ruhrschnellweg tunnel , today's federal motorway 40 . In November 1954, graves were reburied several times.

The entire graves of the Krupp and Waldthausen families ended up in the Bredeney cemetery , with the Krupp family crypts being opened in the presence of directors of the Krupp board and the work of the reburial being precisely documented.

Around 150 graves of other personalities were moved to the east cemetery . To this end, the city of Essen wrote to all families and asked whether and how they consented to the relocation of the graves. In addition, the city had to ask the relatives for documents, because the city documents were all lost in World War II . Finally, all graves were moved, including some collected in a certain area of ​​grave fields 5 and 6 in the east cemetery.

Embedded personalities (selection)

literature

  • Gerhard Müller: The cemeteries in the development of Essen; in: Transience and Monument . Bonn 1985.
  • Heike Schmidt: Cemetery and grave monument in the industrial age using the example of Essen cemeteries: history - design - preservation; an art historical investigation with special consideration of the stone decay . Brockmeyer, Bochum 1993, ISBN 978-3-8196-0151-4 .

Web links

Commons : Friedhof am Kettwiger Tor  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ The Hohenburgstrasse street no longer exists today. It ran south directly adjacent to the main train station. Today's Bert-Brecht-Straße between the railway line and the Schenker headquarters or the RUHR Tower is roughly the extension of the former Hohenburgstraße.
  2. ^ Route of industrial culture: Krupp family cemetery ; Retrieved July 5, 2016

Coordinates: 51 ° 27 ′ 0.5 ″  N , 7 ° 0 ′ 48 ″  E