Nissenhütte

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Nissenhütte in the Munster tank museum

Nissen Hut ( Engl. Nissen hut ) is the name for one of the Canadian engineer and officer Peter Norman Nissen developed in 1916 Quonset in prefabricated construction with semi-circular roof and 40 m² of floor space, a length of eleven and a half meters and five meters wide. During the First World War, it served the army as “mobile accommodation that was as cheap as possible and that could be built quickly. It took four to six soldiers around four hours to set up such a hut.

history

In 1941, the United States developed a corrugated iron hut, the Quonset hut , at Quonset Point , Rhode Island , which was built over 150,000 times and used worldwide.

In the post-war period , the material initially used by the military in Europe was used to set up internment , prisoner and release camps . For the large number of refugees and those bombed out , Nissen hut camps were set up on the edge of the settlements in the British zone and the American zone in Germany. Up to two families were accommodated in the room separated by a thin wall. According to reports, up to 14,000 people lived in these accommodations in Hamburg alone . Inhabited Nissen huts can still be found in Kropp , Brunsbüttel, for example . In Husum , a Nissenhüttensiedlung has meanwhile been placed under monument protection.

In some areas of the Pacific, for example on Espiritu Santo in the island republic of Vanuatu , many of the Quonset huts were still inhabited in 2011. On the Scottish Orkney island of Lamb Holm there is the Italian Chapel, a church building consisting of two Nissen huts.

Differences in the designs

English Nissen huts were usually built from simple corrugated iron with no interior cladding or thermal insulation . Therefore, a small wood- or coal-fired stove was necessary for heating. The lower part of the side walls was painted with camouflage paint in order to achieve a certain degree of rust protection. The radius of the English design was, after a modification of the original model, 8 ft (2438 mm) with a central angle of 210 degrees. The Quonset Hut, similar in terms of usable floor space, had a radius of 10 ft (3,048 mm) and a central angle of 180 degrees. They were also provided with an inner lining made of Masonite, a kind of hardboard. The gap between the inner wall and the outer wall, which was galvanized against corrosion, was filled with insulation material. While the Nissen construction was not further improved in the post-war period, the American construction method was supplemented by a variant with straight walls during use in the Korean War in order to eliminate the disadvantage of using the floor space. The Quonset principle is still being developed and used today.

  • Cross-section of a Nissen hut, ...

  • a Quonset hut (built in 1941) and ...

  • a modified Quonset hut (built in 1957)

exhibition

Nissen Hut set up as a church (RAF Elvington Chapel, Yorkshire Air Museum)

An exhibition about life in the first post-war years shows the true-to-original furnishings of a Nissen hut belonging to an East Prussian refugee family in the open-air museum at Kiekeberg , which comes from the former British military training area at Camp Reinsehlen . Further exhibitions by Nissenhütten can be found in the LVR open-air museum in Kommern , in the Neumünster zoo and on the grounds of the German Tank Museum in Munster . A restored Nissen hut can also be seen in the Friedland camp , which is now used as the facility's documentation center. After 1945, Nissen huts were built there for the initial accommodation of refugees from the former German eastern regions. In Husum there are still seven Nissen huts of a refugee settlement built between 1947 and 1948.

Nissen huts can also be found in military museums in the UK . In the Yorkshire Air Museum, for example, a church has been set up in a Nissen hut.

literature

  • Uwe Carstens : The Nissenhütte. In: Carsten Fleischhauer, Guntram Turkowski (eds.): Schleswig-Holsteinic places of memory. Volkskundemuseum Schleswig Boyens, Heide 2006, ISBN 3-8042-1204-2 .
  • Uwe Carstens: On the history of the emergency accommodation after World War II using the example of a Nissen hut camp. In: Yearbook for East German Folklore. Volume 35, Elwert, Marburg 1992, ISBN 3-7708-0998-X , pp. 375-395
  • Hermann Heidrich, Ilka E. Hillenstedt (Ed.): Foreign home . Refugees and displaced persons in Schleswig-Holstein after 1945 Schleswig-Holsteinisches Freilichtmuseum Molfsee. In: Time + History. Volume 13, Wachholtz, Neumünster 2009, ISBN 978-3-529-02800-7 .
  • Henning Burk, Erika Fehse, Marita Krauss, Susanne Spröer, Gudrun Wolter: Fremde Heimat - The fate of the expellees after 1945. Series 1164 of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, Bonn 2011, ISBN 978-3-8389-0164-0 .
  • Martin Kleinfeld: Nissenhütten - Life in the "half ton". In: Harburg district (ed.). Harburg district calendar 2007. Yearbook for the district of Harburg. Winsen 2006, pp. 79-84.

Web links

Commons : Nissenhütten  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Nissenhütte  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Henning Burk, Erika Fehse, Marita Krauss, Susanne Spröer, Gudrun Wolter: Fremde Heimat - The fate of the expellees after 1945 . 1st edition. Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-8389-0164-0 .
  2. ↑ Life in the bin. Schleswiger Nachrichten of April 11, 2014, accessed on November 2, 2015 .
  3. ↑ Nissenhütte in Husum - couple defends themselves against monument protection. at shz.de. from January 29, 2014.
  4. ↑ NISSEN and QUONSET HUTS
  5. ↑ Monument List North Friesland No. 37385 , Husum, Birkenweg 8-25.