Klein Mehßow

Klein Mehßow Změšowk City of Calau
Coordinates: 51 ° 44 ′ 19 ″  N , 13 ° 50 ′ 46 ″  E
Height :	82 m above sea level NHN
Residents :	64  (Jun 1, 2020)
Incorporation :	January 1, 1960
Incorporated into:	Great Mehsow
Postal code :	03205
Area code :	035435

Klein Mehßow (until July 30, 2004 Klein-Mehßow ), Změšowk in Lower Sorbian , is part of the municipality of Groß Mehßow , a district of the town of Calau in the Brandenburg district of Oberspreewald-Lausitz . Klein-Mehßow belongs to the parish of Groß-Mehßow.

location

Location Klein Mehßow

Klein Mehßow is located in the Mehßower landscape of Niederlausitz , in the west of the Oberspreewald-Lausitz district. Neighboring places are Mallenchen in the north, Säritz in the east, Schadewitz in the southeast, Craupe in the south, Groß Mehßow in the west and Fürstlich Drehna (zu Luckau ) in the northwest. The state roads L 56 and L 553 run through the village, as well as the federal motorway A13 through the district.

The western part of the Feldmark is crossed by the Mehßower lowlands of the Schuche stream from south to north (Tugam border). It is a former moor area , on the eastern edge of which the village is located. The average height here is 80 m above sea level. To the east of this is sandy soil with embedded clay marl, which is used for agriculture (height just over 80 m above sea level). The eastern part of the Klein-Mehßower Feldmark, rising to 108 m above sea level, consists of sandy soil and is covered by forest.

history

Prehistory and early history

The grave finds from Klein Mehßow (Bronze Age) are in the Heimatmuseum in Calau.

An urn grave field from the Bronze Age, west of the vineyard, documents an early settlement of Klein Mehßow (from approx. 1200 - 500 BC). The settlement itself must have been located in the immediate area (about 100 m) west of the burial ground in the direction of today's location and has not yet been proven. With the construction of the Reichsautobahn in 1938, seven graves were discovered that narrow the time span mentioned above. Some of these urns are now in the Calau Local History Museum .

After this almost millennium settlement activity, there is an even longer period of downtime.

middle Ages

The place name indicates that Groß Mehßow and Klein Mehßow have an early common settlement history as Mehßow, which begins at the beginning of the 2nd millennium of our era:

Hundreds of years ago the Mehßow lowlands, with the Schrake, Schuche and the mouth of the Rietzka, formed a boggy, swampy and impassable belt that ran from south to north through the Mehßow district. On its east side, a German knight, who received the Mehßow area as a fief from the margrave, settled in the 12th / 13th. Century and had a small moated castle built directly on the moor of the Schuche. It is the area where the former manor house is located today. Few (probably more German) settlers made this eastern and smaller part of Mehßow arable . The actual settlement arose on the Rietzka brook, on the western side of the Mehßower lowland, the larger part of the Mehßow area. The church was also built here.

Modern times

The manor Mehßow must have been divided a little later after its establishment and the place name changed to Groß Mehßow and Klein Mehßow. The first documentary mentions with the name additions are in 1441 for Groß Mehßow and 1489 for Klein Mehßow: In that year Hans von Buxdorf sold his Bornsdorf goods to Götz von Wolfersdorf. In addition to the castle in Bornsdorf, there were 12 other villages, including Klein Mehßow.

The former manor house in Klein Mehßow is now privately owned and serves as living space.

Klein Mehßow remained in contact with Groß Mehßow through church membership. Baptism, confirmation, marriage and burial took place in the Groß Mehßower church or in the churchyard and from 1820 in today's cemetery.

Klein Mehßow remained in the possession of the von Wolfersdorf family for three generations, until Ulrich von Wolfersdorf exchanged it in 1596 for half from Groß Jehser to Albrecht von Kracht on Mallenchen. From 1596 onwards, Klein Mehßow belonged to Mallenchen for a short time , while the Klein Mehßow farmers leased the land against annual interest. In 1624 Klein Mehßow was sold for 5,350 thalers to the Saxon war captain Andreas von Klitzing, landlord on Göllnitz and Dollenchen . The Klein Mehßower estate was often sold, pledged and auctioned. So the landowners kept changing, and that did not always have a positive effect on its development.

A short connection between the estate and Groß Mehßow was established in 1653. Wilhelm Dietrich von Klitzing married Marie Elisabeth von Minckwitz from Groß-Mehßow on March 5, 1653, who brought 1,500 guilders into the marriage. Their son died a week after the birth and the marriage remained without heirs in the period that followed.

When the landowner Hans Adam von Löben died in 1715, the estate had a debt of 10,490 thalers. An estimate of the property from 1714 resulted in 1,594 thalers income from uses, 3,411 thalers from rising and falling uses and 4,215 thalers from livestock use. In view of the high debts, the sons had nothing left of their father's inheritance and in 1717 they sold it to Friedrich Gottlob von Zabeltitz for 8,500 thalers.

Prussian agrarian reform

Village street in Klein Mehßow.

At the end of the 18th and especially in the 19th century, a comprehensive agrarian reform took place across Europe . As a result, the large and medium-sized peasants were freed from their personal serfdom to the manor. From then on, they were no longer subject to the jurisdiction of the lordship, were released from paying tithes and other burdens, and were given the land on which they previously lived as tenants as their property. Another point of the reforms can be seen in the separation. In order to achieve an improvement in agricultural production, the medieval field was completely reorganized. Splintered agricultural property was amalgamated, the road network was renewed and new ditches were dug.

The agrarian reform in Klein Mehßow was carried out from 1828 to 1831. It mainly affected eight peasant farms ( kossaten ), which were given ownership of their farms , which were previously managed as tenants and dependent on the manor. Their new property now comprised between eight and twelve hectares.

According to the topographical-statistical overview of the Frankfurt administrative district of 1844, the village of Klein Mehßow had 20 houses with 146 inhabitants and a sheep farm and a water mill . The estate covered a size of 360 hectares, of which 97 hectares were arable land, 216 hectares of forest and 13 hectares of meadows and pastures.

First half of the 20th century

The former syringe house of the Klein Mehßow volunteer fire department

A Miss Marie Jansen from Westphalia bought the Klein Mehßow manor in autumn 1902. She was Catholic and wanted to build a chapel with her own chaplain out of the greenhouse . She was very enthusiastic about the beautiful nature and thought to beautify Klein Mehßow.

Fraulein Jansen ordered lots of woodcutters, and in a short time the forest had been cut down and sold as pit wood. Only a few trees that were not strong enough remained standing. Then the forest was reforested with palm trees.

The Reichstag deputy and court president Graeber tried to sell the devastated property for Miss Jansen to the settlement commission at a high price. But when Mr. Graeber, when asked about the value of the goods, replied: “Free too expensive!”, They had to look for another buyer.

This was finally found in Mr. Wernecke, an insurance director from Berlin, who exchanged the goods for a house in Berlin. On April 1, 1903, he moved to Klein Mehßow with his family. Mr. Wernecke had the palm trees sold as sticks, bought cows and pigs and had the stables refilled with them.

After Wernecke (1903), the Landbank Berlin (1905), Hugo Jabbusch (1907), who had properly plundered the Klein Mehßower Forest, there followed Hans Braun (1919, whose manager completely ran down the estate) and finally the last landowner, Walter Höpke (1927). It expropriated then the Soviet occupation forces after the war 1945th

The only salvation for the run-down manor in 1928 was the sale of 75 hectares of land and land to new settlers and old residents. The Klein Mehßow volunteer fire brigade, also founded in 1928, received 31 m² of floor space on the road to Tugam to build a syringe house . The stately cemetery was given to the community free of charge, so that the Klein Mehßowers were no longer buried in Groß Mehßow.

The Reichsautobahn

The construction of the Reichsautobahn, which began in 1933, also affected Klein Mehßow in 1938. Although the route was originally planned via Baruth , Dahme and Doberlug-Kirchhain to Dresden , the current route of the federal motorway 13 was finally implemented.

With the high-tech construction crews of the time, the modern came to the remote little village of Klein Mehßow. Some had seen a steam excavator for the first time in their life . Children wanted to be close to the construction sites because it was exciting to watch the work. Hundreds of workers were on site who also had to be housed.

A construction workers camp was set up between the sheep farm, the cemetery and the new motorway to be built. Civil engineers and site managers rented furnished rooms in the surrounding villages. For the route, part of the vineyard had to be removed, the gravel was used for construction, field railways provided a supply of gravel , cement and other building materials.

In the vineyard, the above-mentioned urn graves from the Bronze Age came to light. The teacher Menzel carried out an emergency rescue in March 1938 and secured 14 urns from 7 graves. The inauguration of the Calau- Ruhland motorway took place in 1939.

End of war and new beginning

Stork's nest on the Klein Mehßow estate in 1985

After the end of the Second World War , the Russian occupying power demanded that life be normalized, among other things by people returning to work, tilling the fields and repairing utilities. Responsible for this was the newly appointed mayor Walter Haberland from Groß Mehßow from May 1, 1945, who had to take over this office for all villages in the parish. The previous mayor, the blacksmith Reinhold Harnisch, was replaced. The Red Army confiscated and expropriated the manor and let it run for two years to supply their soldiers. Thanks to the early spring, the spring seed, the potatoes, were fortunately already in the ground. These could not be stolen and only had to be grown and harvested. The wandering cattle were caught again.

Village pond.

Pasture farming in Klein Mehßow.

The cows on the estate, which were under Russian guard, had to be milked every day. However, due to rape and reprisals in the days before, many women were afraid to take on this job. Until the expropriation of the Klein Mehßow manor in the course of the land reform in 1945, day laborers, farm workers, bailiffs and other servants lived on the farm in the day laborer's house and in other day laborer's houses in the village, at times over 50 residents. After 1945, the displaced persons from the German eastern areas were housed here and new settlements were built on Schäfereiweg (today: To the old sheep farm ). The population rose from 111 in 1939 to 155 in nine years.

The summer time introduced in Germany in 1940 was regulated by the occupying powers from 1945. So on May 2, 1945 the Moscow time, or "Central European Midsummer Time" was introduced. The clocks were put forward two hours. It was valid until September 24th. On this day the clocks were set back one hour to normal summer time and on November 19 back one hour to normal time. The daylight saving time regulation, mostly with an hour shift, was in place until 1949.

From July 1945 there was electricity again in Klein Mehßow and on October 1st, school lessons for the Klein Mehßow children began in the school in Groß Mehßow. In 1946 the bricklayer Reinhold Krüger became mayor. The community council consisted of 9 members, all party members of the SED . The office hours at the council of the municipality were daily from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on the phone number Gollmitz 14 .

In 1947, the Red Army returned the property to the community, before the Russians had taken all the resources with them.

The socialist forced collectivization of agriculture in agricultural production cooperatives (LPG) was initially somewhat voluntary in Klein Mehßow - a type 1 LPG was founded on December 11, 1957 with the name "Correct Way". Siegfried Heymann was the chairman. On March 15, 1959, the cooperative was converted into Type 2, and on January 1, 1971, the merger with LPG Säritz . A second type 1 LPG was founded on April 4, 1960 in Klein Mehßow. She called herself "21. March “and Richard Großmann acted as chairman. On August 24, 1960, the connection to the LPG "Correct Way" took place. The machine-tractor station (MTS) was responsible for the technology of the LPG, of which there was a branch of the MTS Missen in Klein Mehßow.

On January 1, 1960, Klein Mehßow was incorporated into the community of Groß Mehßow . This was incorporated into the city of Calau on October 26, 2003 together with the other previously independent communities Saßleben , Kemmen , Mlode , Bolschwitz and Werchow .

Population development

Population development in Klein Mehßow from 1875 to 1950
year	Residents		year	Residents
1875	130		1890	104
1910	102		1925	99
1933	108		1939	106
1946	153		1950	252

literature

• Rainer Kamenz: The Groß-Mehßower parish - the Groß- and Klein-Mehßower village chronicle . 2016.

Web links

Commons : Klein Mehßow  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Information from the residents' registration office of the city of Calau from June 18, 2020.
2. ↑ Community and district directory of the state of Brandenburg. Land surveying and geographic base information Brandenburg (LGB), accessed on June 17, 2020.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Rainer Kamenz: The Groß-Mehßower parish - the Groß- and Klein-Mehßower village chronicle . 2016.
4. ^ StBA: Changes in the municipalities in Germany, see Link 2003
5. ↑ Historical municipality register of the State of Brandenburg 1875 to 2005. (PDF; 331 KB) District Oberspreewald-Lausitz. State Office for Data Processing and Statistics State of Brandenburg, December 2006, accessed on March 7, 2017 .