City history: The cemetery chapel at Blücherstraße

The cemetery chapel on Blücherstraße is this time the subject of the Bocholt city archive in the series "Historical Photo of the Month". In 1936/37, the city of Bocholt built a new cemetery chapel and mortuary with access on Blücherstraße according to the plans of its structural engineering department. This happened not only in the course of the general enlargement of the municipal cemetery itself.

Rather, it was felt that the previous storage of corpses in the death houses was often not done in a reverent manner. Therefore, the burial system was to be regulated more uniformly in the future. Thus, after the new mourning hall was put into operation, the funeral processions with the mourning relatives, which had been common in the streets until then, also disappeared.

Construction work for the cemetery chapel began in April 1936 with the measurement of the groundwater level and the laying of the foundations in the following June. By the end of August 1936, the shell of the building was already complete, and hopes were high that it would soon be ready for use. But it was not until the spring of 1937 that the building was finally completed. At the same time, the Bocholt councilmen passed a statute with a schedule of fees for the use of the cemetery chapel at a meeting.

The new mortuary, measuring ten by ten meters, has since presented itself with a serious and heavy façade facing the street. The entrance façade is a porch softened by an archway, round windows and facing stone friezes. On the flat tent roof rises a belfry with an electrically operated chime. Inside the chapel is a retractable catafalque in the center, on which the coffin rises. Above it on the back wall is a large crucifix. The floor above the archway forms the gallery for a choir of singers. A harmonium was once placed there.

Behind the mourning hall is the nave with offices, storage and recreation rooms for the cemetery caretakers and sanitary facilities. In the beginning, there was also a doctor's and autopsy room. In the basement there were ten mortuary chambers with rear access for morticians and visitors. For the rear side of the new building, the Bocholt sculptor Hermann Schlatt created two allegorical figures representing a sower and a reaper as symbols of life and death. The new cemetery chapel with mortuary was inaugurated on May 19, 1937.