Willi Wohlberedt

W. Wohlberedt: List of graves ..., here part III

The grave - with the envelope of his life's work carved in stone

Willi Wohlberedt (born July 29, 1878 in Berlin ; † August 26, 1950 in Wieck a. Darß ) was a German homeland researcher .

Life

Willi Wohlberedt spent 40 years of his life looking for the graves of prominent and less prominent people in 250 cemeteries in the Berlin area. He was able to record a total of 5,240 grave sites including short biographies in four volumes of his continuously paginated directory of the graves of well-known and famous personalities in Greater Berlin, Potsdam and the surrounding area . The volumes were self- published in inexpensive equipment .

After Part I was published in 1932, sponsors were found who supported his work. Part II of 1934 was suspected because Wohlberedt had dared to name Jews and Marxists as well. Nevertheless, he found a sponsor in the grave commissioner Ernst von Harnack , who commissioned him to ensure that old graves were reburied during Albert Speer's large-scale demolition and clearing work for the world capital Germania . Part III appeared in 1939, this time without Jews and Marxists, but with forced attention to the National Socialist “heroes”, that is, the majority of the SA men slain by the “Commune” during battles in the hall .

Willi Wohlberedt suffered a few blows of fate. The photo collection, which was in the office of the graves commissioner, was also a victim of the bombing war, as was Wohlberedt's house in Berlin SO 36, Eisenbahnstr. 8, in which his archives were. So he accepted an offer to move to the Darß .

The safe deposit box in which the manuscript for Part IV was located was completely cleared out when the Red Army marched in during the Battle of Berlin and was lost. He spent the last years of his life in Wieck reconstructing this part IV. He was able to present a new manuscript ready for printing, but did not live to see the publication. Part IV was published in 1952 by the Landesgeschichtliche Vereinigung für die Mark Brandenburg , which also had the earlier volumes reprinted.

Wohlberedt painfully regrets in the foreword that he was unable to incorporate the grave of his sponsor Ernst von Harnack: he was executed as a participant in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 in March 1945 and buried anonymously in an unknown location.

Willi Wohlberedt's grave is in the state's own Grunewald-Forst cemetery on the Schildhorn in Department II, R3. The city of Berlin had kept it open for him since the 1930s.

Web links

• Willi Wohlberedt on luise-berlin.de
• Literature by and about Willi Wohlberedt in the catalog of the German National Library