Lankow (desert)
Coordinates: 53 ° 42 ′ 33 " N , 10 ° 51 ′ 44" E
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Lankow is a deserted area in the municipality of Dechow in the district of Northwest Mecklenburg in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on the former inner-German border . Because of the proximity to the border, residents were forcibly relocated from 1952 and the buildings were demolished in 1976. Today the remains of buildings and fruit trees still bear witness to the former settlement.
geography
The village of Lankow was on a peninsula on Lake Lankow , which separates it into a north and south basin. The terrain was shaped by the Pomeranian maximum advance of the Vistula Ice Age. The height of the terrain falls from the Baarsberg to the lake shore from 51 to 31 m above sea level. NHN from. The surroundings of the former village are now characterized by pastures and arable land. The lakeshore is covered with reeds and broken forest. A little northeast of the desert lies the Lankower Forest .
Nearby cities are Ratzeburg about five kilometers to the west and Gadebusch about 16 kilometers to the east. A path that branches off from Groß Molzahn to Neu Thurow and branches off for the last hundred meters and is unpaved for the last hundred meters leads to Lankow.
history
The place name comes from Slavic and means something like located on the swamp , cf. Lanke (toponym) .
The first mention of Lankow can be found in a decree of the Ratzeburg bishop Philipp from the year 1209. However, as excavations show, the area was settled 10,000 years ago. There were two villages, Klein Lankow and Groß Lankow, which were owned by the von Ritzerow family. In 1312 the Ratzeburg cathedral chapter bought Klein Lankow , and in 1370 it came into the possession of Groß Lankow through a donation. The lake was owned by the chapter before. Lankow was placed at the Molzahn farm.
In the catchment area of Lake Lankower, large areas of forest were cleared in the 15th and 16th centuries, which were then used for agriculture. During the Thirty Years' War , Klein Lankow fell desolate, and when he took office in 1644 , the dean Detlev von Bülow found only three farm positions in Groß Lankow. At the end of the 19th century there were three farms, five tied shops and three cottages in the village . A small school existed from 1869 to 1938. After the end of the Second World War , Lankow came to the central municipality of Schlagsdorf . The population rose from 59 to over a hundred from 1942 to 1946 due to the influx of refugees. On July 1, 1950, the place was incorporated into Groß Molzahn . The reorganization to Dechow took place in 1960 at the same time as the merger of the agricultural production cooperatives of Lankow and Dechow.
In the course of border security, GDR authorities, as in other places near the border, forced unpleasant citizens to resettle in 1952 and 1961 through actions with the code names cornflowers and vermin . The remaining residents, 28 in 1973, were also resettled. The completely cleared place was demolished in 1976 and the rubble was pushed into the lake. Large trees were also felled and parts of the area were reshaped in order to gain a clear field of vision and field of fire on the inner-German border . From 1976 to 1990 the Lankower See was criss-crossed by border security systems. Except for the border guards , the restricted area near Lake Lankower was not accessible to anyone. Barbed wire in the lake, a wire barn that spanned the water, signal and expanded metal fences blocked access. The last search for lost mines in the area of the death strip was made in 1995.
Remnants of walls and foundations as well as some fruit trees still bear witness to the former development. In 2009 a memorial stone with the inscription "Lankow, 1209–1976, Geschleift" was inaugurated. Since then there has been a symbolic place-name sign on the access road with the inscription "Lankow, Kreis Gadebusch , District Schwerin ".
Today the Lankower See belongs to the Schaalsee Biosphere Reserve and is accessible again. Here live wild cranes , brooding corn buntings and backed Shrike . The southern basin of the lake, its bank areas and the village site were designated as a nature reserve Lankower See on May 15, 1990.
Web links
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- Information board at the location of the former village of Lankow, Dechow municipality, June 2009
- ^ Paul Kühnel: The Slavic place names in Meklenburg. In: Yearbooks of the Association for Mecklenburg History and Archeology. Vol. 46, 1881, ISSN 0259-7772 , pp. 3-168, here p. 81.
- ↑ a b Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Ministry of the Environment (ed.): The nature reserves in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania , Demmler Verlag, Schwerin 2003, ISBN 3-910150-52-7 , p. 446.