Kreuzkloster (Braunschweig, Germany)

The Kreuzkloster once stood on the Rennelberg outside Braunschweig’s Petri Gate, a 13th-century convent first founded by Ritter Balduin of Campen and dedicated to the Holy Cross and the Virgin Mary. It began as a Benedictine house but became a Cistercian nunnery around 1400, surviving the Reformation by converting to Lutheran use in 1532 under Domina Adelheid von Lafferde. For centuries it ran a girls’ boarding school and a small hospital until the entire complex was levelled in a single air raid on 15 October 1944. Its importance lies in the surviving archive. Between 1484 and 1507 one of its nuns kept a Latin convent diary, later translated and analysed by Eva Schlotheuber with Henrike Lähnemann and published in 2023. The convent also housed a 1414 organ, three early-15th-century altars and a late-gothic pulpit carved by Anton Detlev Jenner, rescued the night before the bombing and now in Aegidienkirche. A 14th-century chalice and medieval vestments survive in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum. Today only the cemetery and the sexton’s house remain on the Freise Street site. The graveyard still shows the 1633 tombstone of Domina Anna von Engelnstedt and the last burial in April 1945. Archaeologists uncovered further graves in 2019, confirming the site’s seven-century use. The walled enclosure, quiet and grass-grown, offers a single view back across the city to where the cloister once stood.