Under the Nazi regime (1933-1945)

From May 1934, negotiations were held between the Münster city authorities and the army to provide accommodation for a divisional staff group of the military district command. The city rejected the proposal to use the site of the old Catholic cemetery on Roxeler Strasse for this purpose. Instead it suggested using a number of plots opposite this site which were owned by various church authorities and which would be amalgamated by way of land swaps to create a sufficiently large plot. The properties in question were situated to the west and north of the Jewish cemetery. The negotiations for these plots of land dragged on until the end of 1938. In the meantime, development plans for the new barracks complex had already been drawn up. These show that the cemetery of the Jewish community was to be left outside the complex, with a garden for the officers to the west of it and a riding arena with stables to the north. No records have yet been found as to when construction of the barracks began, when they were completed, or how they were used. The Reichsfiskus (Heer) – the treasury unit of the German army – was stated as the owner of the complex during the war, and after 1949 it became the property of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1945, the building was taken over by the Evangelische Diakonie (social welfare organization of the Protestant Church in Germany) as accommodation for homeless people, and later as a home for the elderly which became known as the Martin Luther-Haus. From around 1961 to 2019, it was again used as barracks (Blücher-Kaserne).

According to a Gestapo report, “a number of gravestones” in the Münster burial ground were overturned in January 1936. No further desecrations of the cemetery are known to have taken place during the Nazi period. However, the metal enclosures around many graves were removed during the war to be melted down for the armaments industry.

On July 10, 1944, the Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (“Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany”) ordered the Münster City Archives to provide an inventory of the graves in the cemetery to assist it with further genealogical research: while wishing to secure this data, it stated that the “continued existence of the Jewish cemeteries” was doubtful. It clearly had the expropriation or sale of the site in mind. There is mention of a purchase offer dated May 15, 1944, and that "the plots of land and the burial monuments may only be sold at a price corresponding to their full value". According to the 1945 land register, the cemetery was at that time still the property of the Münster synagogue community.

In 1933, the number of burials was well below the average of the previous and subsequent years. This was perhaps due to the passing of the Nazis’ first discriminatory laws and the department store boycott, when it started becoming clear to Jewish families that there was no future for them in Germany. At first glance, the graves may still seem to reflect everyday normality. But if you take a closer look, you’ll see significant blank spaces on a number of gravestones.

When Ottilie Cohen died in 1932, her husband Benjamin Cohen purchased a burial space for two persons and, on the anniversary of her death, had an imposing gravestone erected which bore her name. Benjamin Cohen had been a soldier in the First World War and, as late as November 3, 1934, received the Ehrenkreuz für Frontkämpfer ("Cross of Honor for Frontline Fighters"). At the time, many German-Jewish families in Münster took such awards as a sign that the National Socialist state would not harm them as long as they remained loyal and patriotic. As the renowned textile business in which he worked had succumbed to the global economic crisis in 1929, from the fall of 1933 he was merely a traveling haberdashery salesman. In January 1942, he was among the Jews who were forced to move into the premises of the Marks-Haindorf Foundation, the last so-called Judenhaus. On July 31, 1942, he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto with transport no. XI/1-745 and perished just six weeks later due to the camp's harsh living conditions. The side of the gravestone he had reserved for himself thus remained blank (L18).

Further examples: Moritz Stern (L25) died in 1930; his wife Therese decided to emigrate to England after the November 1938 pogrom night when she was almost 70 years old – leaving another blank space on a gravestone.

Bernhardine Hirsch (L45) died in 1929. Her husband's flourishing grain trade was systematically boycotted from 1933 and subsequently collapsed. Arthur Hirsch is thought also to have emigrated to the USA in 1938.