Crawinkel air ammunition plant
The Luftmunitionsanstalt Crawinkel , officially also Luftmunitionsanstalt 1 / IV , was an ammunition plant of the German Air Force in a forest area near Crawinkel in today's Gotha district in Thuringia . In the last months of the Second World War , part of the grounds of the ammunition plant (Muna for short) was used for a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp .
history
In 1934, construction of the Muna began in the forest area between Crawinkel , Ohrdruf and Wölfis . The inauguration took place on May 10, 1935. The institution was to be used for the final assembly and storage of up to 2,300 tons of bombs, grenades and ammunition in the course of the armament of the Wehrmacht . For this purpose 65 ammunition storage houses ( bunkers ) of the type MH 20 ( ammunition house 20) covered with earth for the storage of 20 tons of ammunition each, and further storage buildings for 10 to 30 tons of ammunition each, were built. The site was developed with a 30 km long road network, Crawinkel train station received a loading platform. A dense network of extinguishing water ponds was built to ensure fire protection . In addition to the ammunition plant and warehouse, there was an administrative area on the site with social and residential buildings, a medical station, guard rooms, garages and energy supply systems. The commander as well as officers, soldiers and fire brigade members were housed in a settlement outside the ammunition plant.
At the beginning of 1945 around 50 bunkers were cleared and fenced in with barbed wire in order to accommodate concentration camp prisoners . The so-called Camp C was built on the grounds of the Muna as a sub-camp of the S III external command of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Between 3,000 and 6,000 prisoners were brought into the camp, who had to build tunnel systems for a Führer headquarters in the nearby Jonastal as part of the "special building project" S III . Up to 80 prisoners were housed in each of the 15 × 15 meter bunkers without windows or heating. Most of them were Soviet prisoners of war and Jewish concentration camp inmates. Many did not survive the conditions in the camp and the forced labor to build the tunnels.
In July 1945, the Red Army took over the area now in the Soviet occupation zone . The Soviet occupiers blew up most of the munitions houses in 1946. During the GDR era, a tank farm was built on the site for the establishment of a tactical fuel reserve for the Soviet Army . It comprised 380 tanks with a total volume of around 10,000,000 liters.
After the withdrawal of the Soviet occupiers, the Landesentwicklungsgesellschaft Thuringia took over the area in 1992 on the basis of an agreement between the federal government and Thuringia and began in 1998 with the first dismantling and renovation measures.
Remediation of contaminated sites and subsequent use
From 2007 to 2014 the final ordnance disposal , contaminated site remediation and the complete dismantling of all existing buildings, bunkers and assembly halls took place for eight million euros . 174,776 pieces of ammunition with a total weight of 70.4 tons, mostly from stocks of the German Reich, were cleared. With the discovery of 1,319 munitions per hectare, the area was the most heavily contaminated area in Thuringia.
The ruin of one of the MH 20 ammunition houses has been preserved as a memorial. An information point has been set up here with three information boards providing information about the history of the air ammunition facility and the rehabilitation of the site.
literature
- Dankmar Leffler: 70 years of the powder keg in Thuringia - The Muna between Crawinkel - Wölfis - Luisenthal and Ohrdruf ; 2004
- Ines Hayer: Powder keg finally defused in: "Allgemeiner Anzeiger", edition 12/2016, page 1
- Klaus-Peter Schambach: Murdered for the Führer headquarters in Thuringia in the external command S III of KL Buchenwald , Heinrich-Jung-Verlag Zella-Mehlis, 2010, ISBN 978-3-930588-81-7