Doggerstollen
The Doggerstollen (also called Doggerwerk ) is a tunnel system in the Houbirg mountain range .
history
From May 1944 to April 1945, prisoners from the Hersbruck satellite camp , a sub-camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp , dug the tunnel using forced labor . Here, essential war-essential BMW aircraft engines were to be produced for a planned underground factory ( U-relocation ) . The site management and the SS command staff were in Happurg . The cover name was "Ash 1".
The prisoners usually walked the five kilometers from the barrack camp in Hersbruck and worked in two shifts. From the Pommelsbrunn train station, a branch line led up to the construction site on the Houbirg to transport materials. By the end of the war, 0.5 million cubic meters of sandstone had been broken into 3.9 kilometers of tunnels; about 750 meters of this was concreted . The total area should have been 100,000 square meters, of which only 15,000 square meters were completed. During this time, the concentration camp satellite camp was occupied by around 9,500 prisoners, and around 4,000 people were killed during the period in question due to the working and living conditions.
Doggerstollen today
The tunnels are now walled up and can only be entered through normally closed doors with special permission. Efforts are currently being made by the "Hersbruck Concentration Camp Documentation Site" association to open a section of tunnel of around 250 meters as a historical document and to make it accessible. The relevant federal authority has already given its approval. The association has financial hopes for the Leader Plus program of the European Union , which could contribute around 50% of the necessary 325,000 euro measure through the title “Health region and tourist revitalization”.
In May 2006, an expert opinion on behalf of the Bavarian Memorial Foundation criticized the lack of “technical, historical, didactic and museological quality standards” in the association's concept. Jens-Christian Wagner, consultant and head of the "memorial Mittelbau-Dora" Nordhausen , fear in his expertise that predominate in the current concept form at the visitors rather "cave romance and enthusiasm for technology" and socio-historical aspects such as the Passion of Hungarian Jews or Cooperation by foreign workers and police prisoners are not sufficiently worked out.
In a statement from July 2006, the association refuted and rebutted the points of criticism of the expert opinion and pointed out that incorrect assumptions led to the negative evaluation of the expertise. The association does not strive for a fully equipped documentation center in or near the tunnels in Happurg, as is assumed in the report, but the focus of the educational and remembrance work should still be in Hersbruck and encompass the entire complex “Subcamp Hersbruck”. The Doggerwerk itself is one of several important learning and memorial sites.
The fact that the subject is not off the table with this expertise is proven by the expertise itself, which refers to the importance of the former concentration camp site in Hersbruck and the Dogger tunnels in Happurg and the need to preserve and mark the two sites in the sense of remembrance. and learning locations is required. With the report, however, the possibility has been nullified of opening the tunnels now or in the near future with the help of - now allocated - EU funds at half the cost.
At a meeting of the Bavarian Memorials Foundation on November 17 and 18, 2006 under the motto "The concentration camp satellite camps in Bavaria, inventory and perspectives" on the grounds of the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, the invited representatives of the Hersbruck Association also had the opportunity to present their Presenting ideas about a Hersbruck / Happurg memorial to the specialist audience present, to concentration camp survivors and representatives of international politics. It turned out that the ideas of the Hersbruck Association and those of the Bavarian Memorial Foundation are not very far apart. In the future, they want to approach each other and work out a concept for a documentation center "KZ-Hersbruck". A schedule for the implementation of the plans is not yet in place.
A memorial is to be inaugurated below the tunnel entrance on January 25, 2016. Six information steles and a historic hammer drill are intended to remind of the hard labor forced by the concentration camp inmates.
In the walled-up tunnel entrances, flight holes for bats were left free. The tunnels are now used to protect species .
Around 10,000 m² of the complex are now considered to be in great danger of collapsing. Some tunnels have therefore been backfilled on behalf of the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks at a cost of around 1.8 million euros since autumn 2017 .
The facility is designated as a historical building by the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments (D-5-74-128-69).
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Documentaries
The Spiegel TV documentary films "Brutality in Stone - The Buildings of the Nazis" (2002) and "The Underground Empire - The Secret Worlds of the Nazis" (2003) show the Dogger tunnel from the inside and offer insights into its history.
There is also the documentary "Hersbruck Concentration Camp and the Doggerwerk" from 1999.
literature
- G. Faul: slave labor for the final victory . Hersbruck 2003. (Ed. Of Documentation Center KZ Hersbruck eV)
- Alfons Baier, Dieter Freitag: The Doggerwerk near Happurg (Nürnberger Land) - On the history and geology of an underground armaments factory. In: Geol. Bl. NO-Bavaria . tape 46 , no. 3/4 . Erlangen 1996, p. 145–174 (short version HTML [accessed on December 31, 2008] 4 figs., 5 plates).
Web links
- Documentation site Hersbruck concentration camp, article "Doggerwerk"
- Details about history and geology
Individual evidence
- ↑ Slave labor in the tunnel in: Nordbayerischer Kurier from 23./24. January 2016, p. 8
- ↑ Partial filling of the tunnels due to the risk of collapse, press report Nordbayern.de of 23 September 2016 with photos of the interior
- ↑ Safety measures are in progress at the Happurger Dogger tunnel. In: n-land.de. May 26, 2018, accessed December 11, 2019 .
Coordinates: 49 ° 29 ′ 34 " N , 11 ° 29 ′ 11.1" E