Ohlsdorf cemetery Hamburg

Ohlsdorf cemetery, Hamburg - darkometer rating : 2 - A huge cemetery in Hamburg , Germany – in fact the world's largest "park cemetery", and the second largest cemetery in the whole world, both by area, after Calverton National Cemetery in the USA , and by the number of people buried there, namely after the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna . It is indeed BIG – well over two miles (3.5 km) from one end to the other, and the total area is nearly a thousand acres. It even has two dedicated bus lines serving it – and you can even drive your own car on its over ten miles (16 km) of roads. It's this size alone that earns this cemetery its place on the dark tourism map, even though the style of the place is mostly rather garden-like and thus hardly of a grim character in its overall appearance. > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos What there is to see: Primarily, of course, the hundreds and thousands of graves amidst a very green park, which is dominated by tall trees. Few individual graves are particularly remarkable, but a couple of special sites and monuments are worth pointing out. The monument and the mass graves of nearly 37,000 victims of the allied bombing raids and subsequent firestorms of 1943 (see also Nikolaikirche and Bunkermuseum Hamm ). Wooden beams on each of the four sections (arranged as a cross) bear the names of those districts of Hamburg that the corpses of the victims were brought here from. The central monument is a rather strange one alluding to Greek mythology, hidden inside a stark square of granite walls – you have to peek through the iron gate. Individual graves around the monument and mass graves share the same dates of death and are marked "durch Fliegerangriff" = 'by air raid'.