Cross (building marking)

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To this day, a black cross on Haus Mohrmann announces the air raids on Hanover : "Searched for corpses ."

A simple cross that survivors used to mark houses that had been damaged or destroyed by aerial bombs after air raids, particularly during the Second World War . After the respective air raids ended, people searched the ruins for survivors and corpses and then marked the buildings to notify others that the search had already taken place.

Well-known examples

1945 , view from the Kröpcke in the Georgstrasse in the direction of the Steintor : After the air raids , the Hanoverians saw a picture of devastation, especially in the city ​​center ; the cross for the search that has already been carried out can be seen in the picture below on the right;
Photography by Edmund Lill

An example of a search for corpses that has already taken place can be found on a photo taken by the photographer Edmund Lill , who documented the destruction of his own business premises at the Kröpcke in Hanover around 1945 on Georgstrasse and Andreaestrasse . From the standpoint of local Bahnhofstrasse Lill photographed and facing stone gate which together already cleared rubble mountains of rubble between which survivors moving.

An example of a still existing cross mark can still be found today at Haus Mohrmann in the Hanover district of Hanover-Nordstadt , where the original cross was preserved for posterity during the renovation of the listed building.

After the bombing raids on Dresden on February 13, 1945, numerous Italian clean-up teams of forced laborers took over the removal of rubble and the recovery of the dead. "Every house in which there were dead was marked by a white cross on the house wall."

In the fourth part of her saga about the Wolkenrath family in Hamburg, the writer Elke Vesper wrote: “They had not yet searched all cellars for the dead. Smashed houses were blown up every day, regardless of whether they were accessible or not. You could recognize these houses by the fact that they were marked with a black or red cross. There were also green and black circles. Or the attack: "This house has been searched." "

variants

There were different variants of the mostly black painted cross:

  1. like the letter X or a black St. Andrew's cross
  2. like a vertical Christian cross or a plus sign, each with a circle around the symbol

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Gerda Valentin: Reconstruction / topping-out ceremony for the Mohrmann House in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung (HAZ) on September 1, 2011, last accessed on August 23, 2014
  2. ↑ Gabriele Hammermann: Forced Labor For The "Allied": The Working and Living Conditions of the Italian Military Internees in Germany 1943-1945 , Library of the German Historical Institute in Rome Vol. 99, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002, ISBN 9783484820999 , p. 188, preview at Google Books
  3. ↑ Elke Vesper : Der Wille zur Liebe , 2013, ISBN 9783104028149 , p. 341, preview at Google Books