Old Jewish cemetery

The old Jewish cemetery was used to bury the deceased of the Diez Jewish community from the end of the 17th century until 1895. From this year it was no longer used for burials, as it had reached its maximum capacity. It is no longer possible to determine how many graves were on it. Given the long period of its existence, there must have been a great many. In 1895, the Jewish community purchased the land for a new cemetery on the opposite Guckenberg. Eternal rest for the dead was respected in this cemetery until the mid-1930s, but then came to an abrupt end at the hands of the National Socialists. In the 1920s, the government of the Reich considered merging the old tax offices in Diez and Limburg. This would have meant the loss of 24 civil servant positions in Diez. In 1933, a delegation from Diez therefore traveled to Berlin and succeeded in getting the new National Socialist government to stop the project. Instead, a new tax office was now to be built in Diez. In December 1935, the city of Diez provided a plot of land on Hermann-Göring-Strasse (= Parkstrasse), which also included a large part of the Old Jewish Cemetery. However, for the construction of the Tax Office, inaugurated on 17.12.1937, this was destroyed in its entirety and leveled.  The question arises what happened to the many gravestones of this now desecrated cemetery. It remains to be assumed that most of these stones were reused as building material within Diez during the construction of the tax office between 1936 and 1937  Then, in 1939, a very shameful subsequent land transaction occurred. The city of Diez sold the site to itself, as there was no Jewish community left to sell it.