Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof Güterfelde

Cemetery description

The Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof cemetery in Güterfelde, located between Berlin and Potsdam, has two burial sites for Polish citizens. In one of them there are buried urns with the ashes of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp’s prisoners killed, between 1940 and 1942, in the main camp and its sub-camps, in labour units (kommandos), and the Pirna-Sonnerstein Euthanasia Centre. The plain-looking burial site with the urns of 383 Poles and 720 Germans (the Sachsenhausen concentration camp’s prisoners) is marked by a stone stele.
Before the Sachsenhausen crematoria became operational in 1942, bodies of prisoners who had died of exhaustion or had been killed in the camp had mostly been cremated in the municipal crematoria and buried in the municipal cemeteries. Similar urn burial sites can be found in other Berlin cemeteries (cf. Friedhof Altglienicke in Berlin).
The victims were commemorated by means of a stone stele upon which stands an urn bearing an inscription that says: ‘Respect for the deceased, duty for the living. Here lie 383 Poles and 720 Germans killed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 1942’.
In the southern corner of the cemetery, in a separate section, there is a Soviet war cemetery - the Soviet Güterfelde Mausoleum. Its central part has a red sandstone obelisk monument with a red star on top. The commemorative tablet placed on the obelisk monument bears an inscription saying: ‘Here lie 1,389 Soviet citizens who, during World War II, were deported, and died in Fascist slavery/forced labour camps’. Apart from the 1,389 USSR citizens (commemorated by the obelisk monument), 101 Poles, 4 Yugoslavs, 2 Italians and 1 Czech were buried in this burial site.
There is no information, however, about the remaining foreign citizens whose graves can be found here. The deceased were forced labourers, prisoners and prisoners of war, whose remains were exhumed from the cemetery for foreign citizens located south of Berlin, in the village of Mahlow.
Since 2006, no new burials have taken place in the Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof cemetery in Güterfelde. There is every possibility that the cemetery will be transformed into a park area with apartment buildings on the edge. Despite the planned changes, the war grave sites will be preserved and cared for.

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