Goldbacher tunnel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Entrance to the Goldbacher tunnel from the 1960s (2010)

The Goldbacher tunnel near Überlingen on Lake Constance was built between June 1944 and April 1945 by prisoners from the Überlingen-Aufkirch satellite camp and was intended for the underground relocation of armaments companies that were important to the war effort from Friedrichshafen .

prehistory

As the center of the armaments industry of the National Socialist German Reich , Friedrichshafen was the preferred target of Allied air raids during the Second World War . By the end of the war, almost all factories, including the production facilities of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin , Maybach-Motorenbau , Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen and the Dornier works, as well as large parts of the Friedrichshafen city area, were destroyed. From 1943 onwards, parts of the armaments production were relocated to the Friedrichshafen area.

On May 1, 1944, three days after another heavy air raid on Friedrichshafen, the " Jägerstab ", responsible in the Ministry of Armaments for the increased production of fighter aircraft, ordered the construction of tunnels for the Friedrichshafen companies in Hohenems in Vorarlberg and Überlingen. In Überlingen there were rocks made of molasse , a soft and easily excavated rock , directly on the Stahringen – Friedrichshafen railway line . Organized by the "Armaments Inspectorate Upper Rhine", construction work began in early June 1944; a construction time of 100 days was planned.

construction

Shank and tip of the drill used in construction
Tilting lore exhibited in the tunnel, which was used to remove the spoil
General view of the Birnau concentration camp cemetery with two high crosses

The Munich engineering office Arno Fischer was in charge of the construction management for the tunnel system with the camouflage name "Magnesit". The company carrying out the construction was Siemens-Bauunion from Munich , which in turn hired several subcontractors . Smaller installation work was also carried out by craft businesses from the surrounding area. The Todt Organization was responsible for construction supervision on behalf of the Ministry of Armaments.

Initially, 100,000 m² underground area was planned in the Goldbacher tunnel; in autumn 1944 the area was reduced to 40,000 m², on which the companies Maybach-Motorenbau, Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen and the Dornier-Werke were to produce. Each company was assigned a longitudinal tunnel equipped with a rail connection should be equipped. By the time construction work was stopped at the end of the war, 17 transverse tunnels and eight access tunnels with a total length of over four kilometers had been built alongside the longitudinal tunnels. The tunnel width varies between two and 25 meters, the height between two and ten meters; some of the crossing points were expanded to form a hall. Apart from some window tunnels, the bottom level of the tunnels is between 399 and 402 m above sea level with an average water level of Lake Constance of 396 m above sea level. The area above the Goldbacher tunnel, which was already densely built up with residential houses before 1944, is between 10 and 60 meters above the bottom level of the tunnel.

Concentration camp prisoners were used to speed up the construction work. The Überlingen-Aufkirch subcamp is mentioned for the first time on September 3, 1944 in surviving documents from the Dachau main camp . An average of 700 concentration camp prisoners were housed in the satellite camp near Aufkirch, about 1.5 kilometers from the tunnel. Guarded by 25 SS members under the camp commandant Georg Grünberg , the prisoners worked twelve-hour shifts building the tunnel without any precautions for their personal protection . They were busy driving with heavy equipment such as pneumatic drills and pneumatic hammers as well as removing the overburden , which was loaded onto tipping lorries, driven to the shores of Lake Constance and dumped there. A campsite is now located on the resulting embankment.

In parallel with the tunneling, employees of the Friedrichshafen companies set up the production facilities in the completed parts of the plant. According to reports from former Dornier employees, a separating wall with a steel door had been built between the work areas of the company employees and the concentration camp prisoners, which was moved as the tunnel construction progressed. In the event of explosions , the concentration camp prisoners were forbidden from being in the safe area behind the partition wall, which injured prisoners. Contacts between the workers and the prisoners were prevented by the SS. One of the prisoners, Anton Jež, reported in 1998 that the rock in the roof of the tunnels was constantly falling off , in which prisoners were killed or seriously injured. Other accidents occurred when unexploded charges were removed. Jež described the relatively mild temperatures that would have prevailed in the tunnel in winter as "luck" for the inadequately clad and poorly fed prisoners. Boris Kobe, a Slovenian prisoner, drew tarot cards shortly after the end of the war , which also describe the working conditions in the tunnel. You can see prisoners who are trodden to work on the march and are bitten by dogs , prisoners spilled from fallen rocks, working with a jackhammer and pushing a tilting lore by hand.

Construction work on the Goldbacher tunnel was stopped in mid-April 1945, shortly before Überlingen was liberated by the French army. The surviving concentration camp prisoners were evacuated to the Allach subcamp near Munich on April 20 . When the construction work was stopped, machines were already set up in some areas of the tunnel system; production had probably not yet started.

The dead

The first two dead were buried in the Überlingen cemetery. More dead came to the Konstanz crematorium. Finally, the dead were buried in a grove.

At least 170 concentration camp prisoners died in Überlingen. How many of these were killed in - sometimes arbitrarily provoked - work accidents is unknown. The names of the known dead of the tunnel construction were documented by Oswald Burger . The dead prisoners are buried in the Birnau concentration camp cemetery , which is 300 meters from the Birnau pilgrimage church .

Reuse

Goldbacher Stollen Memorial
Guided tour inside the gallery

Immediately after the end of the war, looting took place in the tunnel, which was soon stopped by the French occupation authorities. After the dismantling of the existing facilities in the tunnel, the occupation authorities had all entrances and part of the tunnel system blown up in 1947 so that the underground facilities were only accessible via emergency access. 3.6 kilometers remained accessible, of which 2.5 kilometers can be driven by passenger cars and 1.2 kilometers by trucks. According to the result of the war law , the federal government took over the Goldbacherstrasse tunnels, responsible is the Federal Property Administration .

In the 1960s, a new entrance to the tunnel system was created to allow maintenance work. During this time, the use of the Goldbacher tunnel as an air raid shelter was discussed. Between 1983 and 1989, the Federal Property Administration had extensive renovation work carried out in which the previously unsecured surfaces were provided with shotcrete . In 1984 the city of Überlingen erected a memorial at the entrance to the tunnel complex, consisting of a cross partially wound with barbed wire and a commemorative plaque. Since 1981 there have been regular tours of the tunnel system, which has been a documentation center since 1996. The tunnels are used as winter quarters for up to 300 caravans and boats; a use that sparked controversial discussions in Überlingen in 1994. Former prisoners agreed to its use during on-site visits.

In addition, the tunnel was used after the plane collision in Überlingen in July 2002 to store the recovered body parts in a cool place during identification and thus to slow down the decomposition process.

On May 8, 2005, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the prisoners, a concert by the Latvian State Choir under the direction of Maris Sirmais with works by Górecki took place as part of the 17th  Lake Constance Festival.

literature

  • Oswald Burger: The Stollen . Ed .: Association of Documentation Center Goldbacher Stollen and Aufkirch concentration camp in Überlingen eV 12th edition. Edition Isele, Eggingen 2017, ISBN 978-3-86142-087-3 , p. 39 ff .

Movies

  • Medienwerkstatt Freiburg: Under Germany's Earth. Video, Freiburg im Breisgau 1983.
  • Stephan Kern, Jürgen Weber: How Dachau came to the lake ... Video, Querblick Medien- und Verlagswerkstatt, Konstanz 1995, ISBN 3-9804449-1-0 .

Web links

Commons : Goldbacher Stollen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ For the prehistory see Burger, Stollen , p. 11 f.
  2. ^ Roland Peter: Armaments policy in Baden. War economy and labor in a border region during World War II. (= Contributions to military history , volume 44) Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-486-56057-3 , p. 187 f.
  3. ↑ The following figures can be found in Burger, Stollen , pp. 13–21. See also General plan for www.stollen-ueberlingen.de. Accessed April 21, 2010.
  4. ↑ For the satellite camp see Oswald Burger: Überlingen (Aufkirch). In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 2: Early camp, Dachau, Emsland camp. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52962-3 , pp. 514-517.
  5. ↑ a b Burger, Stollen , p. 22.
  6. ↑ Anton Jež: The tunnel was our misfortune and our luck. Memories of the Überlingen / Aufkirch concentration camp external command. In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (Eds.): Subcamp concentration camp - history and memory. (= Dachauer Hefte , Heft 15) Verlag Dachauer Hefte, Dachau 1999, ISSN  0257-9472 , pp. 46–53, here p. 49.
  7. ↑ Burger, Stollen , p. 79 ff. The cards of the tarot game at: Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies ( University of Minnesota ): Boris Kobe. Accessed April 21, 2010.
  8. ↑ Jürgen Oellers: With the Kipplore into freedom. In: Harald Derscka / Jürgen Klöckler (ed.): Der Bodensee. Nature and history from 150 perspectives. Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2018, ISBN 978-3-7995-1724-9 , pp. 268-269.
  9. ↑ Burger, Stollen , pp. 28 ff. And pp. 89–94
  10. ↑ Figures in Burger, Stollen , p. 66.
  11. ↑ Burger, Stollen , p. 73.
  12. ↑ Gudrun Dometeit, Göran Schattauer and Marco Wisniewski: Ueberlingen: Inferno in idyll . In: Focus , Issue 28, 2002. Accessed April 17, 2010.
  13. ↑ Memorial concert commemorates the horror. In: Südkurier from May 4, 2005. Accessed April 17, 2010.

Coordinates: 47 ° 46 '14 "  N , 9 ° 8' 26"  E