Altenberg ski jump

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The Altenberg-Schanze was a field hill on the Altenberg near Bad Wimpfen from the time of the Thirty Years' War . Today it can only be seen in the aerial photograph.

discovery

From the ski jump on the Altenberg about one kilometer east of Wimpfen am Berg there were still fragments of wall in the 1950s. The archaeologist Gustav Scholl viewed the building as a Latin age refuge . Agriculture on the Altenberg completely destroyed these remains until the early 1980s. The aerial photograph archaeologists Rolf Gensheimer and Rainer Ruschke then independently identified the exact layout of the complex on aerial photographs in 1984 and reported it to the Baden-Württemberg State Monuments Office as a new find, where it is now dated to the time around the battle of Wimpfen in 1622 .

history

Since the winter of 1621/22 Tilly had billeted a Bavarian contingent in Wimpfen. For the years 1620 and 1621 there are no more council minutes. Entrenchment works in and around the city are first documented for the spring of 1622 - without a precise location. A ski jump on the Altenberg is mentioned for the first time in 1623, when the construction of a guardhouse was first discussed and a little later the permission to raze the facility was given. Some field names on the Altenberg still refer to the former ski jump.

investment

The square closed hill with bastion points enclosing an area of ​​around six ares shows a transition form between redoubt and star hill , as it can be found elsewhere in the late 16th and especially in the 17th century, especially in the Netherlands. The system was formed from a wall and a ditch, the wall was filled up with the trench excavation. The side length is around 96 meters, the parapet (without bastions) is 45 meters long on each side.

The height of the wall and the incline of the wall crown were measured according to the state of the art of firearms at the time. A muzzle loader could only be loaded in a standing position and only tilted down a little when loaded, otherwise the bullet would have rolled out of the barrel. Therefore the wall had the height of a standing rifleman (approx. 1.85 m) and an approx. 50 cm high step to offer the man parapet . The inclination of the wall crest and the width of the trench resulted from the maximum angle of inclination of the loaded muzzle loader, which had to be able to fire the terrain immediately in front of the outside of the trench. The size of the field hill was determined according to the effective range of a short rifle, fire from the entire flank had to cover the side up to the bastion tips. According to the usual measure of 3 feet in width per shooter, there was space for up to 600 men on the parapet. A crew of 160 men is documented for 1623. Since no other structures apart from the guardhouse are mentioned or can be seen in the aerial photo, the crew was probably only accommodated for a short time and under the simplest conditions.

An embankment north of the ski jump was interpreted by Scholl in 1961 as a Gallic dry stone wall ( Murus Gallicus ), but is no longer recognizable as such today. It is unknown whether and how the approximately 270 meter long embankment is connected to the ski jump. It is possible that there was an early fortress on the Altenberg, the foundation of which was then perhaps used to build the field hill.

literature

  • Rainer Ruschke: The ski jump on the Altenberg / Bad Wimpfen: A bastioned field hill from the Thirty Years War , in: Regia Wimpina - Contributions to Wimpfen history , Volume 7, Bad Wimpfen 1995, pp. 112-137.
  • Alois Schneider: A field hill from the Thirty Years War on the Altenberg near Bad Wimpfen. In: Preservation of monuments in Baden-Württemberg , 39th year 2010, issue 3, p. 192 f. and reply p. 196 ( PDF )

Coordinates: 49 ° 13 '37 "  N , 9 ° 10' 34"  E