Tobruk
|
Arabic طبرق Tobruk |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
|
|||
| Coordinates | 32 ° 5 ' N , 23 ° 58' E | ||
| Basic data | |||
| Country | Libya | ||
| al-butnane | |||
| ISO 3166-2 | LY-BU | ||
| Residents | 121,052 (2005) | ||
 Tobruk Harbor
|
|||
Tobruk , also Tobruq ( Arabic طبرق, DMG Ṭubruq ), is a Libyan city on the Mediterranean . The place has 121,052 inhabitants (as of January 1, 2005) and is located in the Kyrenaica . Tobruk is an important port city and the end point of a petroleum pipeline . There is also an oil refinery near the town . It was the scene of several fierce battles during World War II in 1941 and 1942 . Tobruk is the capital of the Al-Butnan municipality . In 2014 it became the seat of the government of Libya and the Libyan parliament.
history
Tobruk was founded in antiquity as a Greek colony of Antipyrgos , which was primarily used for agriculture . Later, the Romans built a fortress near the city to guard the border of the Cyrenaica. In the centuries that followed, it served as a station on the great caravan route along the southern Mediterranean coast. In 1911 the place came to Italy as part of the Italo-Turkish War . The Italian troops rebuilt the area around the city into a strong fortress by 1940.
Tobruk was a small place with less than 2,000 inhabitants during the Second World War, but it had a deep sea port and the aforementioned fortress.
On January 22, 1941, the city was conquered by British forces and around 25,000 Italians were taken prisoner . The German advance in North Africa under the command of Erwin Rommel was marked by speed, so the heavily fortified place was initially only enclosed and not conquered in order to be able to advance quickly.
At that time, Tobruk was defended by an Australian unit, which fought off two attempts at conquest by the German Africa Corps in April , and from August 1941 the city was additionally reinforced by Polish units . Deeply staggered defensive positions consisting of anti- tank trenches , bunkers , machine-gun and PAK nests made it almost impossible to advance into the place. The place was besieged until the end of 1941 and massively bombed by the German air force . As part of Operation Crusader in December 1941, the defenders received relief .
In May 1942, during the Theseus operation , the city was again the target of German-Italian advances and after two weeks of fierce fighting, the defense was finally broken. The Allies capitulated on June 21, 1942. 32,000 Allied soldiers were captured and the conquerors lost around 5,000 tons of supplies and 10,000 tons of fuel . As a result, Rommel was appointed field marshal general.
In September 1942 a British commando operation on the city was foiled, but Tobruk had to be abandoned after the Axis defeat at El-Alamein in November 1942.
In Tobruk, the central German war memorial for the German soldiers who died in Libya is also on a hill above the city . It is a square building of 40 by 40 meters with four round towers at the corners. 6,026 soldiers were reburied in it, including the German fighter pilot ace Hans-Joachim Marseille (“The Star of Africa”). The monument was inaugurated in 1955 by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge . The memorial bears the inscription :
Infrastructure
Tobruk is on the historic Via Balbia coastal road , which leads west to Benghazi, around 300 km away, and east to the Egyptian border at Musaid and Sollum. From Tobruk (Adam) airport, 25 km south of Tobruk, the Tobruk – Ajdabiya desert road leads southwest to Ajdabiya on the Great Sirte, 410 km away .
literature
- Adalbert von Taysen: Tobruk 1941 - The struggle in North Africa. Verlag Rombach, Freiburg 1976 (= individual publications on the military history of the Second World War. Volume 21). ISBN 3-7930-0180-6 .
Web links
- Images of the war cemeteries of all warring parties
- Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge eV on the Tobruk war cemetery, accessed on July 7, 2012
Individual evidence
- ↑ dw.de
- ↑ Encyclopædia Britannica (2006) ( Memento of January 2, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Gustav Grote, Deutsche Corpszeitung 4/1958, p. 147.