Border Museum Schifflersgrund
The Grenzmuseum Schifflersgrund is a museum in the municipality of Asbach-Sickenberg in the district of Schifflersgrund . It lies on the former border strip of the former inner-German border between the places Bad Sooden-Allendorf and Sickenberg and is a reminder of the division of Germany into the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany . It was the first border museum in the reunified Federal Republic and was opened on the 1st anniversary of reunification. The aim is to preserve some historically significant remains of the former border, to make it accessible to posterity and to make the history of the German division comprehensible and, moreover, to show the regional aspects of this division.
location
The Schifflersgrund Border Museum is located on the former inner-German border between Hesse and Thuringia . It is located on a piece of land that was added to the former Soviet occupation zone (later GDR) in 1945 as part of the Wanfried Agreement . That is why the site of the documentation center is now part of the Thuringian district of Eichsfeld , but historically the area belongs neither to Thuringia nor to the historic Eichsfeld region, but to Hesse. The museum is housed in various buildings, some of which served as border buildings on the part of the GDR in the region.
history
The museum was opened on October 3, 1991 and has been under the sponsorship of the “Arbeitskreis Grenzinformation e. V. “(seat: Bad Sooden-Allendorf ). The management is incumbent on the first chairman of the association Wolfgang Ruske, who is also the initiator of the working group and the museum complex. Since then, the museum has grown bit by bit and over the years has collected all kinds of exhibits on the topics of the German-German border, life in the restricted area and regional-specific features.
Exhibitions
The museum provides information in seven sections on the topics of the end of the war, development of the occupation zones, life in the restricted area and developments in the GDR in 1989. In two areas, regional-specific aspects such as the Wanfried Agreement and the death of Heinz-Josef Große are dealt with. Große was shot dead by two border guards while trying to escape on March 29, 1982 . The crime scene is located on the site of today's museum, which is also considered a memorial to this story. A container serves as a cinema ; a film about the wall can be seen here, also in foreign languages. Escape attempts are also reported on the basis of individual examples. In 2009 the museum had about 45,000 visitors.
Some citizens have secured parts of the border system so that the observation tower BT-9 and around 1,000 m of border fence with control strips and patrol path have been preserved in their original condition. Here it is shown how over four decades an almost insurmountable border as the "Iron Curtain" separated Germany and Europe in west and east, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Observation towers, barbed wire, expanded metal and mines were used over 1,378 km to prevent people from the GDR from fleeing to the West . Other exhibits, such as the original border control post from 1990 and a large number of vehicles and helicopters are shown. This technique was used for border security by border troops of the GDR and the Federal Border Guard (today Federal Police ).
Publications
- Hans-Gerd Adler : Bridgeheads , Asbach-Sickenberg, Working Group Border Information e. V., 2009, ISBN 978-3-00-028444-1 .
- Edith Behrends, Jakob Eisler: Between memory and new common ground. Border Museum Schifflersgrund. Bad Sooden-Allendorf 2016
- Siegbert Spiegel: The Thuringian-Hessian border museum "Schifflersgrund". Cordier Druck / Medien Heiligenstadt
Web links
- Literature from and about Grenzmuseum Schifflersgrund in the catalog of the German National Library
- Literature from and about Grenzmuseum Schifflersgrund in the bibliographic database WorldCat
- Official homepage of the border museum
- Thüringer Allgemeine: Border Museum with a new concept - November 4, 2011
- Visit of the TLZ in the border museum - March 29, 2010
- Bundeswehr - On the trail of the German-German past - November 23, 2007
- TLZ: New projects in the border museum Schifflersgrund - February 9, 2011
- Film with which the museum presents itself as an extracurricular learning location
credentials
Coordinates: 51 ° 17 ′ 7 ″ N , 9 ° 59 ′ 37 ″ E