Stockheim ammunition depot
The Stockheim ammunition depot was a facility of the Belgian Army on Landesstraße 327 between Stockheim and Niederau in the Düren district , North Rhine-Westphalia .
The approximately 130 hectare area was set up shortly after the Second World War (around 1953) and hermetically sealed off by a fence. The "Alte Gasse" leading right through it could no longer be used by the population.
The lockdown persisted when the military cleared the site in the mid-1990s because over 180 asbestos-contaminated ammunition huts were spread across the site. Because of this, these huts could only be disposed of by a specialist company in accordance with strict safety rules. In 2003, the Strabag company finally acquired the entire area from the Federal Property Administration with the aim of being able to build residential buildings in a sub-area . The contractual obligation was taken to dispose of all the ammunition huts properly by the end of 2013 and to make the forest area available to the population again.
Until the construction of the residential houses and thus the development of the new development area “Marieneiche”, houses of the military complex served as accommodation for asylum seekers . Trucks parked in the open spaces that brought goods to the paper mill in Niederau, about two kilometers away, or picked them up there. They were called up for loading or unloading from the warehouse in Stockheim.