Free life (Lebusa)

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Memorial stone in free life

Freileben is a district of the municipality Lebusa in the Amt Schlieben in the district of Elbe-Elster in the state of Brandenburg .

geography

Geographical location

Freileben is in the northeast of the office Schlieben, on the state road L704 between Kolochau and Lebusa. The place is surrounded by coniferous and mixed forest. To the west and north of the village are arable land . The municipality of Striesa is northwest of Freileben. To the south of the village is the Hölle nature reserve .

history

Buchengrund
View of Dorfstrasse 1951

In the summer of 1945 there was a high demand for housing due to the influx of displaced persons and refugees from Bohemia and Moravia , but also from Silesia , East Prussia and West Prussia . Although the refugee families were housed in farms and emergency shelters, they hardly had a livelihood of their own, which repeatedly led to tensions with the local population. At that time, nine families were quartered in the vacant forester's farm Waidmannsruh between Lebusa, Hohenbucko and Krassig. The castle in Lebusa was also fully occupied with families. As part of the land reform, the KPD tried to build a settlement on the grounds of the Lebusa manor, which initially failed due to the availability of building materials. At the same time, the settlement project was advertised. In April 1946, 19 families started building the first ten houses in Freileben. In the Chronicle of Lebusa it says: ... The only thing that was available in sufficient quantity for building a house was wood, everything else was missing, even water. Buckets of it had to be carried out of trenches and often women with handcarts had to be used to transport the sand from the nearby sand pits when the sand was urgently needed.

Ms. Marta Grasse was the first to finish the cellar excavation, which is why the foundation stone for the site was laid there on September 1, 1946 under the threshold of her house at Zum Buchengrund 6. “It was a difficult time,” the 83-year-old recalled. During the day working in the fields, after work building a house. On November 3, 1946, 30 settlers founded the Waidmannsruh model settlement. The settlement should serve as a model village in a socialist society. In the course of the land reform, the settlers' cooperative received 789 hectares of land from the property of the former manor in Lebusa. It was mainly about forest areas on which the trees had been destroyed by forest fires (this area belonged to a firing range of the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War). In the immediate vicinity was the Schlieben sub- concentration camp , an armaments factory of the HASAG group, in which over 2,000 prisoners from Buchenwald concentration camp were used as cheap labor.

The state government of Saxony-Anhalt approved 50,000  marks as emergency aid and a further one million marks until 1949 in the form of loans to expand the town. The growing of tobacco soon generated good income, which was invested in a vehicle fleet, a workshop and a sawmill. The cooperative was also supported in this, this time by the Soviet military administration Merseburg SMAD , which had already promised help in founding a new village in order 115 of September 8, 1945. In the period that followed, the cooperative received 23 wagons of lime, 20,000 liters of diesel fuel and a few vehicles. Nevertheless, the first ten houses could not be moved into until 1948. Other trades such as a gardening shop were set up and expanded. On October 7, 1948, the state government of Saxony-Anhalt passed a law establishing the community of Freileben. The founding celebrations took place on October 24, 1948. The first mayor of the community was Ernst Sachse. By 1950, a further 73 houses, a sales point, a post office, a library, a cowshed, pigsty and larger orchards were built. In addition, the volunteer fire brigade in Freileben was founded in the same year . In 1950 the first mayor resigned from office. Franz Hiller became the new mayor. On July 1, 1950, Striesa became a district of Freileben. In 1951 the outpatient clinic was inaugurated. The cooperative's money was repeatedly withheld, which almost led to the economic end of the cooperative. The chief accountant and a member of the board left for West Berlin in order to evade criminal prosecution by the GDR authorities. On February 10, 1952, under pressure from the state government, it was decided to dissolve the cooperative. All of the settlers received their shares back. The companies were nationalized or transferred to state- owned property . In 1961 an auxiliary school with boarding school was established in the village.

On December 31, 2001, Freileben was incorporated into Lebusa.

Web links

Commons : Free life  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

literature

  • Rosa Exner: We came from the Sudetenland, memoirs of a resettled woman , Friedling and Partner 1996, ISBN 3-8280-0145-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. The first socialist village in the Herzberg district Commission for the Study of History, 1979
  2. StBA: Changes in the municipalities in Germany, see 2001

Coordinates: 51 ° 46 ′ 57 ″  N , 13 ° 23 ′ 56 ″  E