Gypsum tunnel (Neckarzimmern)
The gypsum tunnel in Neckarzimmern in the Neckar-Odenwald district is an extensive tunnel system in which around 170,000 m² and more than 40 km of road and rail routes are used by the German armed forces. The original gypsum mine , going back to the 18th century pit Hornberg, played already in the war economy an important role in both world wars. Some of the access roads are located directly on the B 27 .
history
Early decomposition of calcite
As early as the early 18th century, calcite was extracted in the vineyards on the Neckar, which belong to Hornberg Castle, in the Steinbach hamlet belonging to Neckarzimmern . The calcite was then sold as a marble - alabaster stone. There was a dispute between the Electoral Palatinate government and the then lordship of Gemmingen-Hornberg , as the Electoral Palatinate government assumed ownership of the deposit. However, a later process made it clear that the barons of Gemmingen were the legal owners. Initially, the mined stone was mainly used for burning lime , later it was also sold to various porcelain factories. In 1739 the personal request of Elector Karl Philipp reached the barons of Gemmingen-Hornberg to deliver marble for a pyramid of fountains in Mannheim. After it was pointed out that the stone obtained was not marble, only a block was delivered against payment.
Mining Concessions and Speculation in the 19th Century
In the projects in Steinbach dig a new well to want one encountered in 1841 about 22 feet deep on formal gypsum rock . After this discovery, in January 1841 the master miller Maysack, who ran the Neckar mill in Steinbach , and Messrs. Wilhelm Gänger and Philipp Höllmüller from Neckarzimmern asked the responsible district office in Neudenau for a prospecting license for gypsum in Steinbach. In the following February, Maysack received a mining permit for gypsum for Steinbach from the Directorate for Forestry Domains and Mines in Karlsruhe . At the same time, Höllmüller and Gänger jointly received a prospecting license for Neckarzimmern. In 1849 a few more people received prospecting permits and were given the gypsum pit as an enfeoff; at the same time, Gänger gave his prospecting license back, as he did not have the desired success. In the period that followed, there were several other changes, until finally in 1889 a Mr. Messner sold the cutting and plaster mill to a Mr. Espenschied from Mannheim . He immediately asked for permission to build a cement factory . For this purpose, a commercial police permit was issued, but not the water police permit, which is also necessary for this, because Espenschied's refusal to present the exact plans of the plants that should use the hydropower of the Neckar . It was assumed that the advanced construction of the cement factory was only intended to sell the mill and the tunnel at a large profit after receiving the concession. Various sales advertisements also matched this, in which he stated the mill's power was 800 horsepower , although it was actually only 30 hp. Finally, in 1891, the “gypsum and water drive” went to the barons of Gemmingen-Hornberg. In general, people in the village were satisfied with this development, as the owners had repeatedly run out of working capital in the past. The gypsum gallery and the mill operations that were intertwined with it now experienced a slow but steady upswing. A few years later, several dozen employees were permanently employed in the gypsum distillery, grain and saw mill and in the tunnel. Were manufactured u. a. Plasterboards .
Armaments production at BASF in the First World War
A few years prior to World War succeeded in the above only in coking plants resulting ammonia according to the Haber-Bosch process (patent application 1910 by the BASF ) to prepare industrially using gypsum. Ammonia was an important intermediate product in the manufacture of ammonium nitrate , which was used both as a fertilizer and in the manufacture of explosives ( ANC explosives , ANNM ) as well as in the manufacture of saltpetre and other chemicals. As a result, BASF was looking for suitable gypsum deposits in the vicinity of its 1913 plant in Ludwigshafen-Oppau , under great secrecy via straw men . Eventually they found what they were looking for in Neckarzimmern and BASF reached an agreement with the barons Franz and Max von Gemmingen-Hornberg on May 1, 1914 on the use of the tunnel, including the runway system, hut (probably the gypsum distillery) and mill. At the same time, the feudal right over the gypsum pit from 1881 was renewed. However, all systems were only allowed to be built underground. The construction of larger systems above ground was expressly excluded, only an office building was built in 1915, which is now used by the Neckarzimmern gypsum works .
BASF expanded the mine considerably. Due to the acute shortage of potash nitrate after the outbreak of World War I , the German Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn urged BASF to produce ammonia on a large scale for the German armaments industry. As a result, gypsum mining in Neckarzimmern was intensified, at times up to 500 railway wagons of material are said to have left the tunnel every day and were driven in long trains to Ludwigshafen-Oppau. Since sulfur was also one of the war-important shortages, the Reichsschwefelwerk was built in the neighboring Haßmersheim from 1916 , which also obtained gypsum from Neckarzimmern. At that time, many prisoners of war also worked in the tunnel and were housed in the barracks camp built for the Reichsschwefelwerk in Haßmersheim. In the tunnel, the extracted rock was transported to a cable car by means of a railway system with a gasoline locomotive. This transported it on to crushers and mills that were able to grind 1,800 tons (as of 1922) gypsum every day . The power supply came from a power station that was set up in the former mill, which also supplied the town of Neckarzimmern with electricity. In old pit plans you can see that all the engine sheds, workshops and explosives depots as well as some of the offices were located underground in the tunnel. The new mining areas under the Steinbacher Wald, which became necessary as a result of the tunnel expansion, were obtained by BASF through a contract with the municipality of Neckarzimmern. The area gained comprised around 23 hectares , for which the community received compensation of 120,000 marks . A similar contract was signed with Franz von Gemmingen-Hornberg for another area of roughly the same size.
The gypsum gallery in Neckarzimmern and the Reichsschwefelwerk in Haßmersheim jointly had their own post office with their own postmark during the First World War .
Until 1929, the tunnel and the facilities were operated by BASF. However, due to newly developed technical processes, the extracted gypsum was no longer required for the production of ammonia, and in 1929 BASF stopped mining. After that, the Portland cement company continued to mine gypsum, albeit to a much lesser extent. Payment was made to the mine owner, based on the amount of gypsum extracted and was between three and five pfennigs per ton of raw gypsum.
“Construction company Neustadt” in World War II
In the mid-1930s, the Reich Treasury began to be interested in the facility. It was intended to use the underground facility as an ammunition store for the Wehrmacht . The von Gemmingen-Hornberg family then tried to persuade BASF to start mining again. However, these attempts were unsuccessful. Under the threat of expropriation without compensation from the Reich Treasury, the family finally found themselves compelled in 1938 to consent to an easement as an ammunition store, which was compensated with 10,000 Reichsmarks per year. An additional contract concluded in 1942 provided that half of the proceeds from the continued gypsum mining, now 88.2 Reichspfennige per ton, would go to the owner family and half to the state.
The ammunition that was planned to be stored in the tunnel was the fully assembled artillery shells in the Siegelsbach Army Ammunition Plant, which was built in 1939 . However, such storage never took place, as the planned direct railway line from Siegelsbach to Neckarzimmern was not built, so the shells were stored in Siegelsbach until they were dispatched.
Around 1942, the Todt organization began to massively expand the facility under the code name “Baubetrieb Neustadt”, but only a third had finished with it by the end of the war. In May 1944, a large production facility for roller and ball bearings from VKF (today: SKF GmbH Schweinfurt ) began to be set up in the tunnel. Production started in September 1944. The main plants in Schweinfurt and Bad Cannstatt provided the administrative and permanent staff .
Forced laborers from the Neckarelz concentration camp in the immediate vicinity were used to drive the tunnel and to assist in production. For this purpose, there was also a barrack camp on site on the site of today's conference center of the Evangelical Youth in Baden, which the local memorial for the deported Jews from Baden reminds of.
The plant was operated until the end of the war in 1945, after which the entrances were blown up by the Wehrmacht. The Americans cleared the entrances again and arranged for the machines and equipment to be transported back to the main plants in Schweinfurt and Bad Cannstatt.
Gypsum mining after the Second World War
On August 1, 1946, a new contract was signed between Portland Zement AG and the von Gemmingen-Hornberg family that regulated the extraction of the gypsum deposits. The raw gypsum was to be processed further in the newly acquired gypsum plant (Neckarzimmern). The agreed remuneration was 250 Reichsmarks per month and 0.07 Reichsmarks per ton of raw gypsum. Around the same time, part of the tunnel system was rented to Beck mushroom cultivation . Due to the increasingly poor quality of the raw gypsum in the gallery, the mining contract was terminated by Portland Zement AG on July 31, 1952 and the gypsum mining stopped.
Bundeswehr material depot
The United States Army took an interest in the facility as early as 1953 in order to use it as a military depot . This was followed by several inspections and inspections of the facility, later also by representatives of the newly founded Bundeswehr . Finally, in 1957/58 a rental agreement was signed between the owner family and the Federal Republic of Germany . Since then, the Bundeswehr has been using the tunnel as a material depot . There are also workshops as well as telecommunications and IT nodes and more in the tunnel.
In 1973, the Federal Republic of Germany submitted an offer to the von Gemmingen-Hornberg family to purchase the tunnel and the forest and arable land above it. However, the owners refused to sell this centuries-old family property. In the mid-1980s, the owner family was faced with a further attempt by the state to reclaim the facility for the state , as it had done in the 18th century and at the time of National Socialism . An employee of the regional tax office responsible at the time informed the family by telephone that in his opinion the federal government would not be obliged to pay rent in the future. This was followed by a letter of termination and the suspension of rental payments. A subsequent judicial process, however, rejected this state attempt to change the legal and property status of the gallery in favor of the state.
In 1996 around 1,200 civil and military employees worked in the underground facility, which included the following positions:
- Air Force Material Depot 41
- Air Force Shipyard 41
- Material control center south
- EIFEL data center
- Telecommunications switching
- Main Army Equipment Depot
- Technical operating group of the local site administration
However, due to the frequent reorganization of the Bundeswehr in recent years, this no longer reflects the current status. The Bundeswehr currently uses around 170,000 m² of space and more than 40 km of roads and paths in the mountain.
The system was repeatedly up for grabs because of the supposedly high maintenance costs. On the other hand, there is a high level of security against theft of material and weapons, which can be maintained with comparatively little effort, as well as the far lower damage to the material due to corrosion due to the defined climate in the tunnel , which means that fewer or no conservation measures are required for the stored material. In addition to military aspects and for reasons of economy and the potential for cost savings compared to surface systems, it has been decided up to the present to continue using or expanding the system.
literature
- Hans Obert: 1200 years of Neckarzimmern. Self-published by the Neckarzimmern community in 1973
- Hans-Wolf v. Gemmingen-Hornberg: Historical development from the gypsum mine to the armed forces depot. Script, Neckarzimmern, 1985
Individual evidence
- ↑ G. Leonhard: Baden's minerals after their occurrence . 2nd Edition. Schweizerbart'sche publishing house and printing company, Stuttgart 1855, p. 9 ( digitized version [accessed September 27, 2014]).
- ^ Wilhelm Petzold: Military site Siegelsbach , in: Kraichgau. Contributions to landscape and local research , volume 18, 2003, pp. 299–335.
Coordinates: 49 ° 18 ′ 43.6 " N , 9 ° 8 ′ 52.8" E