Jewish cemetery on Geschwister-Scholl-Strasse

The Jewish cemetery on Geschwister-Scholl-Strasse

The Jewish cemetery on Geschwister-Scholl-Strasse in Brandenburg an der Havel is the former cemetery of the city's Jewish community and a Holocaust memorial . It is listed as a monument and one of two Jewish cemeteries in the city that were used in the 20th century.

history

The first Jewish cemetery existed at the latest by the 14th century southeast of the Neustadt Brandenburg . At the latest after the expulsion of the Jews from the Mark Brandenburg in 1571, all community life came to a standstill and this cemetery was probably no longer used. It was not until the late 17th century that Jews settled in Brandenburg again. The Jewish community laid out a new cemetery in 1747. In 1770 a morgue was built. The cemetery was last expanded in 1840. In 1860 the morgue was rebuilt before it had to give way to a new building in 1895.

On the night of November 9-10, 1938, the Reichskristallnacht , during the pogroms by the Nazis, the synagogue and the city's Jewish cemetery were desecrated and the mourning hall was devastated or destroyed. The organizer of the destruction and anti-Semitic attacks was Wilhelm Sievers , the city's mayor at the time. In the years that followed, Jewish community life was wiped out during the Holocaust . The last living in the city members of the Jewish community were on April 13, 1942 deported . Only about ten Jewish citizens of the city of Brandenburg survived the Nazi dictatorship.

The Jewish cemetery was confiscated by the state. In December 1943, the city of Brandenburg bought the cemetery from the regional finance president of Berlin-Brandenburg. The property of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany had been transferred to him a short time before. The city in turn sold the cemetery grounds in January 1945, just a few months before the end of the Second World War, to Brennaborwerke , which had its factories in the immediate vicinity and was planning a sports field there . The end of the war a few months later prevented this project. In the final weeks of the war, however, the cemetery was badly damaged in an Allied bombing raid on the factories.

Central plaque of the Holocaust memorial

In 1947, the surviving Jews asked the city of Brandenburg to restore the Jewish cemetery. In the run-up to the day of remembrance for the victims of fascism on September 12, 1948, the city council decided to design the cemetery as a memorial in keeping with a worthy memory . A second memorial was built on the preserved south wall of the former synagogue in the playground of the Frederic-Joliot-Curie School in Grosse Münzenstrasse. The destroyed cemetery was cleared. A memorial wall was made from gravestones on the south-east wall of the cemetery. This memorial wall was designed in such a way that a large plaque was created in the center on which the city's Jewish citizen murdered in the Holocaust is remembered by name. To the side of this, more boards were attached to the wall, on which the names and dates of death of those who were buried in the cemetery are noted. The memorial was handed over to the GDR Jewish community on June 17, 1951 .