Deer disaster
The Hirsch disaster occurred when the “Hirsch” inn collapsed in Nagold, Württemberg, on April 5, 1906 while attempting to raise the structure. More than 50 people died and a further 100 people were injured, some seriously.
The large number of victims results from the fact that during the work there was no ban on entry to the building or the immediate vicinity for the many onlookers, some of whom spontaneously operated the winches themselves. Many of the later dead were at a ceremony in the restaurant on the first floor or on the floor above during the lifting to be lifted with the building.
The head of the project, the building contractor Erasmus Rückgauer , who previously successfully lifted around 80 houses with the method he had worked out (in another building collapse), survived slightly injured and was later sentenced to several months' imprisonment due to his numerous neglects a serious illness and his death soon thereafter, however, could no longer compete.
building
The inn was built in 1852 after the previous building fell victim to the fire in the city center of Nagold on the night of September 23, 1850. It stood on the property on the corner of Hirschstrasse and Marktstrasse opposite the town hall . In 1868 an annex was added so that in 1906 it was around 24 meters long, 11.25 meters wide and weighed 650 tons. The building had a basement , two full floors and a knee floor . The lower floor was made of sandstone blocks, the rest of the house consisted of brickwork and plastered timber framework . The entrance was on the side facing Marktstrasse. The first floor contained a coach house and wooden stables. Two utility rooms as well as the kitchen and a private apartment were located on the first floor, while the second floor contained a larger hall as well as utility and guest rooms. The house was adorned with a plastic representation of a deer as an inn symbol.
prehistory
Hirschwirt Klein had sold the building to his son-in-law Theodor Neudeck on December 27, 1905. He had recently inherited an inheritance and wanted to redesign the inn, in which several clubs operated. In particular, a higher hall should be built. In the course of the changes, the inn should be raised by about 1.60 meters. The plans for the redesign were made by the city master builder Josef Lang, who was also supposed to supervise the construction work. However, the raising of the building was awarded in a separate contract. Erasmus Rückgauer prepared an offer on February 22, 1906, in which he expressly assumed responsibility for any accidents that were due to his fault or that of his employees, but not for coincidences or "damage caused by invisible construction errors". The elevation should cost 4,000 marks . In March 1906, the plans submitted by Josef Lang were approved by the local council. With regard to the elevation of the building, it was also decided to block part of Marktstrasse to carts on the day of elevation, to cordon off the building at a distance of up to four meters, to install warning signs and to illuminate at night between the elevation and the underpinning. According to Rückgauer's concept, this should only take place when the total height of the uplift has been reached. Furthermore, the building authorities reserved further orders.
The tavern was allowed to operate even while the building was being raised, as neither Josef Lang nor Erasmus Rückgauer had warned against this. At this point in time, Rückgauer had already lifted, rotated or relocated around 80 buildings , although the attempt to lift the Café Waldburg in Lichtental near Baden-Baden had failed and ended with the building collapsing. In Nagold, the successful elevation of the “Zum Grünen Baum” inn in Altensteig was particularly well known.
method
Rückgauer used a system that had been developed in the USA in the 1890s. He did not make any detailed inquiries about the condition of the respective house prior to his building surveys; he considered an inspection of the interior to be sufficient. As far as such a need was recognized, the buildings were repaired before they were lifted, then separated from their foundations and underpinned with a beam grating. The building was then enclosed with sprouts and struts and fitted with castors. The weight of the house was also calculated and winches were set up as required . Round timbers were placed vertically between the winch plates and the grate.
Events
The raising of the inn was to take place on Thursday, April 5, 1906. Work on it began at 7:00 a.m. According to the contract, Neudeck had to provide the operating team on the winches. Erasmus Rückgauer had only brought his room polisher Kübler and seven instructed workers with him. Neudeck had around 20 people working under the master carpenter Benz. In addition, there were 25 workers from the Beutler and Drescher construction business as well as 20 to 30 members of the gymnastics club and the Liederkranz as well as other people, some of whom apparently took part spontaneously in operating the winches. Most recently around 100 people were employed on the winches. In addition to Kübler, Benz and Drescher as well as the workers Zugermaier and Luz were supposed to be in control. In the indictment, however, the hustle and bustle was later compared to an anthill, counting and measuring were not or not with the necessary care. External control was shared by Erasmus Rückgauer and a few other people. According to the indictment, there was also a lack of reliable organization here. According to building supervisor Schmid, it could already be determined at 8:00 a.m. that the annex on Marktstrasse was too low in relation to the rest of the house. Three quarters of an hour later he had moved away from the wing structure of the house, at 9:00 a.m. the ridge tiles began to shift and half an hour later the back wall of the stairwell was sticking out. Various cracks were observed. There was a bang at around 10:30 a.m. The southern gable temporarily took a hanging position, around 11:00 a.m. the stairwell deviated from the posts, so that experienced workers refused to work at this point. At 12:30 p.m., the southern gable was 5 to 6 cm lower than the northern one; according to Schmid, the uplift in the kitchen area was not moving forward at this point and a first stone had fallen out of the wall under the left kitchen window. Further lifting caused the building to move. At the border to the extension, roof tiles fell down, after which the northeast corner gate on the first floor collapsed. A few minutes later, the building first swiveled south and then north and then collapsed like a funnel, with the rear half of the roof falling into the courtyard and the south gable into Hirschstrasse. The one outer wall on the long side had been pressed into Marktstrasse.
Apart from the 100 or so workers, there were other people in the inn at the time of the collapse, as the inn business on the first floor, which was accessible via an emergency staircase, was continued and there were also people in the hall on the second floor who were with the Wanted to raise the inn.
Senior Medical Officer Dr. Fricker gave the death toll from the collapse at 52. The majority of these people suffocated under the rubble and rubble. However, 53 names are mentioned on the plaque in the burial chapel, which was later built for the victims; Gottlob Müller apparently died of the long-term consequences of the accident in December 1906. In addition, almost 100 people were injured.
Rescue work began immediately after the collapse. The dead were laid out in the town hall, some of the injured were also brought to the town hall. Bandages, stretchers and instruments were delivered from Freudenstadt and Calw with aid trains. Rückgauer, who had reacted negatively to the various warning signs and had himself been buried, had suffered injuries, but was able to drive back to Stuttgart in his son-in-law's car that same day.
Cause of accident
Construction officer Schmid from Stuttgart , who later investigated the case, stated that the inn was not in a condition that could be lifted. In particular, the beams that had rested on the ground floor were rotten and partly broken, especially under the kitchen and the toilet, and on the first floor there were also rotten wooden parts in the area of the kitchen, the staircase and the toilet. Lang had some areas repaired, which some workers had already considered insufficient in advance. There were also defective chimneys in the building. The grate that was placed under the ceiling of the first floor consisted of three different parts of different heights and therefore could not serve to hold the house together safely. This was also not stiffened and secured by additional connections of the individual parts. The number of stands used - 18 in total - was too small and the distribution of the 85 winches from the Esslingen machine factory was arbitrary. The ball joints of the winches, which Rückgauer had touted as his personal specialty, were also criticized.
Reactions
A few hours after the accident, telegrams of condolence from the king and queen arrived in Nagold, and in the evening, Interior Minister Johann von Pischek appeared on site as a representative of the government. District President Friedrich von Hofmann as a representative of the Black Forest District also went to Nagold on the day of the accident, as did Senior Public Prosecutor Cless from the Tübingen District Court, who started the investigation with Senior Magistrate Sigel.
In the following days extensive press reports appeared and a brisk disaster tourism developed . On Palm Sunday 1906, so many vehicles drove by and through Nagold that “the road dust appeared as if it had been ripped off the tracks”. The printing house of the Official Gazette partner sold special editions and views of the disaster house. A little later, the I. Junginger publishing house brought out a brochure entitled The Disaster in Nagold , which spoke of 55 fatalities. The fate of the maid of the Neudeck family was remembered, who is said to have dreamed of the collapse of the inn shortly before the disaster and was among the dead. In addition to gruesome details of the individual deaths, wonderful rescues were also reported.
The local council met on April 7th and decided not only to take part in the burial of the Nagold victims planned for the same evening in the cemetery near the Egidius Church, but also to take part in a communal grave with a fence and a memorial that must not be touched before the year 2000 to finance through the city. The city should also bear the costs for the funeral music and for the car in which Court Marshal von Neurath and Minister of State von Pischek were to be picked up. Furthermore, the clean-up work at the site of the accident was to be pushed ahead and people who were in dire need as a result of the accident were to be given rapid support.
The communal burial of the victims from Nagold took place in the early evening of April 7, 1906. A fundraising campaign was launched for the surviving dependents and those with health problems, and an aid association was founded that was responsible for paying pensions to the victims. Payouts were made until the 1940s; for 1942, six widows and six injured persons are recorded as eligible.
In addition to the voluntary services provided by donors, follow-up costs of the accident were also borne by the city of Nagold. She initially paid 596 marks for the treatment of the injured and 437 marks for the removal of rubble that was obstructing traffic in Marktstrasse. These were first brought to the "island", but then transported to the municipal gardens on Calwer Strasse, as they would otherwise have posed a danger in the event of flooding. In order to compensate for these costs, the city tried to use the timber from the collapsed inn that could still be used, but Theodor Neudeck objected to this. Claims for damages by the Württemberg building trade association against the city of Nagold were initially valued at 67,155 marks. In a settlement they finally agreed on 30,000 marks.
Furthermore, according to the resolution of the local council of April 7, 1906, the tomb in the Nagold cemetery should be financed by the city. The cost of this was set at 1,000 to 1,500 marks, but "in the hope that the expense would approach the lower limit". Government master builder Schuster submitted a draft that was approved with minor changes and carried out by city master builder Lang. The facility was inaugurated on October 13, 1907. The graves of the Nagold victims are marked with uniform stone slabs and arranged around the chapel, inside of which there is a plaque with the names of the victims. Two tombstones for members of the building contractor families are more elaborately designed and are at the back of the chapel.
From the Hirsch inn in Nagold, the inn boom with the plastic representation of a deer has been preserved and recovered from the rubble. It still exists as a tavern sign for the Hirsch inn in Überberg . This house burned down in 1905 and was rebuilt in 1906.
The chapel in the Nagold cemetery
Inscription in the pediment
The names of the dead
One of the uniformly designed tombstones
Stadtschultheiß Brodbeck was in office at the time of the disaster
Rückgauer's trial and fate
Rückgauer commented on the accident on April 16, 1906 in a letter to building officer Schmid. In it, he blamed the people who stayed and moved inside the building for the collapse: "I and my people have expelled the intruders from our workplace, but for guests and friends of the inn owner Neudeck, who immediately entered the economy on the 1st floor .I wanted a stick, I had no violence. Some of these people came from far away and wanted to be lifted into the inn with the inn, prompted by the newspaper trumpet and the writing out of a butcher's soup , which I didn't know about beforehand. “But not the guests on the first floor, but those on the second are actually the ones Been the cause of the accident. They ran back and forth between the windows, rocking the building until it finally collapsed. Rückgauer also argued in court. His works leader Kübler made a similar statement in court. A witness also reported that on previous visits to dance events at the Hirsch Gasthof, he noticed that the floor of the hall on the second floor could be shaken easily.
There was disagreement among the interrogated witnesses about any alcohol consumption by Rückgauer on the day of the elevation. However, the innkeeper of the Green Tree in Altensteig, Louis Kappler, stated that on April 3, 1903, when his inn had been opened, Rückgauer had declined an invitation to wine on the grounds that he had to be at work now. A reduced culpability of Rückgauer due to alcohol consumption was not accepted by the court, although his family doctor had described him as a habitual drinker and sanguine . Rückgauer was eventually sentenced to six months in prison.
The main hearing took place from October 15 to 20, 1906, before the criminal chamber of the Tübingen Regional Court, the defense submitted an appeal for a review in November of the same year, but it failed. Rückgauer was to begin his sentence in Rottenburg on May 6, 1907 . However, a stay of sentence was obtained because Rückgauer was seriously ill at the time. He suffered from liver disease with jaundice and ascites as well as general loss of strength. Already during the court hearing he had made a broken impression: “Rückgauer himself [...] made the pitiful impression of a man who had completely collapsed both inside and out. His back arched more and more, his head sank lower and lower, he answered all [...] questions in a dull, toneless voice [...] ”, wrote a witness to the court proceedings. Rückgauer died on May 31, 1907.
literature
- Hermann Scheurer: The "Hirsch" catastrophe in Nagold on April 5, 1906. Geiger, Horb 1992, ISBN 3-89264-666-4 .
Web links
- Article in the Schwobablättle (PDF; 545 kB)
- Article on the cemetery chapel
- Report on an art project on the deer disaster (PDF; 1.4 MB)
Individual evidence
- ^ Hermann Scheurer: The "Hirsch" catastrophe in Nagold of April 5, 1906. Geiger, Horb 1992, p. 10.
- ↑ Scheurer: The "Hirsch" disaster. 1992, p. 15.
- ↑ Scheurer: The "Hirsch" disaster. 1992, p. 16.
- ↑ Nagold official journal partner , quoted from Scheurer: The "Hirsch" catastrophe. 1992, p. 26.
- ↑ quoted from Scheurer: The "Hirsch" catastrophe. 1992, p. 66.
- ↑ Scheurer: The "Hirsch" disaster. 1992, p. 66.
- ↑ quoted from Scheurer: The "Hirsch" catastrophe. 1992, p. 35 f.
- ↑ Scheurer: The "Hirsch" disaster. 1992, p. 41 f.
- ↑ Scheurer: The "Hirsch" disaster. 1992, p. 47.
- ↑ Julius Brügel, quoted from Scheurer: The “Hirsch” catastrophe. 1992, p. 55.
Coordinates: 48 ° 33 '5.8 " N , 8 ° 43' 22.9" E