Golf Resort Berlin Pankow

Origins

A Munich-area cosmetic surgeon who had already built a golf resort in Bavaria is an unlikely source for one of Berlin's largest golf facilities, but that is how Golf Resort Berlin Pankow came about. Dr. Rüdiger Umhau, founder of a golf facility at Schloss Egmating in Bavaria, learned of an available site in Berlin's Pankow district through a woman from the area who had trained for her playing certificate at his Bavarian course. At the time, central Berlin had only two golf courses, at Gatow and Wannsee, while Bavaria already had many, so Umhau began looking east.

The site itself had no golfing history: former irrigation fields and fallow agricultural and semi-rural land on the city's northeastern edge. Pankow's district administration had no fixed plan for the land at the time, and Matthias Köhne, then the district's environmental councilor and later its mayor, helped move the necessary permits and zoning changes through quickly.

Development

Construction ran from October 2004 to July 2005. Umhau's team worked with the land's existing contours rather than reshaping it, moving comparatively little earth and planting roughly 3,000 trees from the outset, a number that has continued to grow. Golfclub Pankow von Berlin e.V. was formally founded on 9 May 2005 and entered into Berlin's register of associations on 8 July 2005; the course became playable that September.

Former West German national team goalkeeper Sepp Maier, a longtime personal friend of Umhau, agreed to serve as the club's patron and a founding member, lending his name to the flagship 18-hole layout, the Sepp-Maier-Platz. A second, separately registered club, Golfclub Berlin Blankenburg, was founded in 2008 to play over the same grounds. What opened as an 18-hole course plus the 9-hole course am Fließ (27 holes total) later grew to 36 holes across four layouts with the addition of a 6-hole short course and a 3-hole practice course.

In August 2021, hole 10 on the Sepp-Maier-Platz was reconfigured and re-rated by the Deutscher Golf Verband as a par 6. At 634 meters from the men's tees (562 meters from the forward tees), it became one of only three officially rated par-6 holes in German golf, alongside holes at Golfpark Karlsruhe and Tölzer Golfclub.