Fort Heppens

Seeschleuse Wilhelmshaven , the former location of Fort Heppens.

The Fort Heppens was a defense work of the Jade estuary and later part of the fortress plan of Wilhelmshaven . On the other side of the Jade Bay, there was a similar work, the Grand Duchy battery .

history

Franzosenschanze

In 1811, under Napoleon, the Heppenser Battery was built, which has long been popularly known as the “Franzosen-Schanze”. It was equipped with 17 guns that stood on the permanent field of Groden. The French dismantled the fortification in 1813. The battery covered the mouth of the jade with the batteries on the other side of the jade in Eckwarden and on the large Oberahn field . The facility was located on a wall-like extension of the dike and had no buildings or defenses in the immediate vicinity.

Construction of the fort

The handover of the Jade area from Oldenburg to the Kingdom of Prussia in 1854 took place at the Heppenser Battery. It was initially only a makeshift battery armed with two 28 cm cannons and eleven 24 cm cannons. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, Fort Heppens was completed as a beach battery to protect the eastern flank of Wilhelmshaven; the construction work was completed in 1875. The fort was used to train marines. A caliber shooting was carried out once a year with the lively participation of the population. Fort Heppens was razed for the construction of the fourth entrance . A fortification road connected Fort Rustersiel with Fort Heppens, the road was laid out on Neuer Groder Weg and equipped with an ammunition train. After the Second World War, the southern route of the fortification street was renamed Freiligrathstraße and Rustersieler Straße .

See also

• Article in the Wilhelmshavener Zeitung about Fort Heppens

literature

• Herman Frobenius : History of the Prussian engineer and pioneer corp from the middle of the 19th century to 1886, Berlin 1906.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Wilhelmshavener Heimatlexikon AJ . S. 467 f .
2. ^ Wilhelm Janßen: The Vareler harbor . 1993, p. 66-70 .
3. ^ Frank Gosch: fortress construction on the North Sea and Baltic Sea. The history of the German coastal fortifications until 1918 . 1st edition. Mittler, Hamburg / Berlin / Bonn 2003, ISBN 3-8132-0743-9 , pp. 51-64 .
4. ↑ Herman Frobenius: History of the Prussian engineer and pioneer corp from the middle of the 19th century to 1886 . Berlin 1906, p. 351 .
5. ^ Wilhelmshavener Heimatlexikon AJ . S. 319 .

Coordinates: 53 ° 31 '46.3 "  N , 8 ° 9' 2.4"  E