Oedheim military airfield

The military airfield Oedheim was an air base of the Second World War , which was located south of Oedheim from 1938 to 1945 .

location

The runway of the 75  hectare airfield ran south of today's state road 1088 ( Bad Friedrichshall -Kochendorf- Öhringen ) approximately in an east-west direction. Due to its location above the Neckar and Kocher valleys , a suitable level was available here. The system was connected to the railway network via a branch from the Untere Kochertalbahn at today's Hirschfeldpark. The forest "Aspenloch" on the southeastern edge served as a hiding place for the ammunition bunker.

history

1937 to 1945

As part of the four-year plan , the Luftwaffe set up the Oedheim military airfield from 1937 to 1938 in order to be prepared for a possible attack against France . The realm leased the necessary land, which consisted of 520 different parcels of land used as fields or orchards , which belonged to 302 different owners. Only the 1.2 hectare area for the main building was purchased.

In the shadow of the looming Second World War, the airfield was occupied by 800 soldiers and 40 fighter planes from August 1939 . During the campaign against France , a squadron of 16 aircraft flew three missions a day in a westerly direction. From 1943 the airfield itself became a regular target of Allied air raids , which claimed two lives on January 20, 1945.

When the war front approached the Unterland at the end of March 1945 , the units moved to Nuremberg . The Luftwaffe blew up fuel tanks, ammunition bunkers and other facilities before they withdrew.

The following table shows a list of selected active flying units (excluding school and supplementary units) of the Wehrmacht Air Force that were stationed here between 1939 and 1945.

From	To	unit
October 1939	October 1939	I./JG 77 (I. Group of Jagdgeschwader 77)
May 1940	May 1940	II./KG 53 (II. Group of Kampfgeschwader 53)
June 1940	June 1940	II./KG 55

1945 until today

After the war, the buildings were used to temporarily accommodate displaced families. In part of the site, the US crew guarded an aircraft graveyard of shot down Allied machines that were awaiting scrapping here. The embankment to the airfield site was removed in 1955.

Immediately after 1945, the municipality of Oedheim tried to return the site to the owners as quickly as possible and to make it usable as arable land. To do this, the existing bomb craters were filled with rubble and covered with earth. Since the old property boundaries were no longer recognizable, the municipality provisionally determined new ones. A communal fiduciary "Flugplatz-Abwicklungskasse" transferred the lease between users and owners. Should this condition, first as an interim solution, it became a permanent temporary structure that up to a land consolidation lasted mid-1980s: Basic were plans to build a factory and in the 1970s considerations, a later oil refinery between Oedheim and Neuenstadt to settle .

The hills and debris from the bunkers that were blown up can still be found along the Dohläckerweg in the “Aspenloch and Lohwald recreation forest”. In addition, there are no more traces of the former air base.

literature

• Anton Henkel: Oedheim. Contributions to local history. Oedheim community, Oedheim 1975.
• Ralph Walter (Ed.): 750 years of Oedheim. 1235-1985 . Oedheim community, Oedheim 1985.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Henry L. deZeng IV: Air Force Airfields 1935-45 Germany (1937 Borders) , accessed on August 29, 2014

Coordinates: 49 ° 13 ′ 54 ″  N , 9 ° 15 ′ 45 ″  E