Oerbke
Oerbke is a village in the municipality-free district of Osterheide , which belongs to the district of Heidekreis in the southern Lüneburg Heath in Lower Saxony .
geography
Oerbke is the administrative seat of the unincorporated district of Osterheide. It lies on the western border of the area with the town of Bad Fallingbostel and is only separated from it by the A7 , which forms the western border of the Osterheide over a longer distance.
history
The farming village of Oerbke was first mentioned in a document in 1256, as early as 1438 there were 8 farms in Oerbke, as well as 4 droppings. The courtyards and kots can also be traced later according to the registers 1563, 1589 and 1628. In Oerbke, probably due to the good soil, there is great persistence on the farms and cottages. Until 1935 the village had been dominated by agriculture for centuries.
During the Third Reich , the German Wehrmacht set up a prisoner-of-war camp in Oerbke , the main camp Stalag XI B (357) Fallingbostel , and later in 1941 the Stalag XI D (321) Oerbke, which housed up to 30,000 Red Army soldiers, in the immediate vicinity .
"When the first waves of Polish prisoners rolled in, 32 wooden barracks for the prisoner-of-war camp 'Stalag' XI B Fallingbostel in Oerbke were built on an area of 18 hectares at the Oerbke construction workers' camp."
In December 1944, 81,780 prisoners - mainly from the Soviet Union - were housed in Stalag XI B. There were several prison camps for the work details in the area. Numerous contemporary witnesses report on human relationships that persisted even after the end of the war in 1945. There were also “organized resistance movements”, as Baumann shows (pp. 297–303).
The American Richard Burt remembers a “ death march ” that began on February 6, 1945 in Stalag Luft IV in Groß Tychow in Poland and ended after 86 days in Oerbke.
“Our hope of being able to stay in Stalag XI B was short-lived. ... We left the camp a week later, on April 14, 1945. "
The Oerbke death march followed the same goal as several marches to the Baltic Sea.
On April 16, 1945, Stalag XI B with 13,375 prisoners from ten nations was liberated by British troops.
The Ukrainian sculptor and professor Mykola Muchin-Koloda created the memorial with the figure of a dying man on behalf of the Soviets in 1945 .
After 1945, the Oerbke camp was initially used by the British armed forces as an internment and displaced persons camp, and later as the eastern Oerbke settlement for the armed forces at the Bergen military training area.
In November 2012, the Lieth School in Bad Fallingbostel organized a “Path of Remembrance” from the ramp of the freight yard in Bad Fallingbostel to the former Stalag.
On September 12, 2015, the first 200 refugees arrived in the new emergency shelter in Oerbke, which is supposed to provide space for more than 1000 people. The site is to become the new distribution hub for refugees in northern Germany.
politics
The community-free village of Oerbke belongs to the community-free district of Osterheide . The inhabited areas of this district are represented by elected residents' representatives to the area owner, here the federal government.
The chairman of the local council is Seeben Arjes.
Culture and sights
- Cemetery of the Nameless , a war cemetery where around 30,000 Soviet prisoners of war from World War II were buried in mass graves.
- The “Gate to Freedom” memorial on Fallingbosteler Strasse commemorates the prisoners of war from 13 nations who were captured here between 1939 and 1945. More than 30,000 of them died here.
Cemetery of the Nameless
Memorial "Gate to Freedom"
Town view
Planning meeting for emergency accommodation in Oerbke
Architectural monuments
See also the list of architectural monuments in Oerbke
literature
- Hinrich Baumann: The Heidmark - Change of Landscape: The History of the Bergen Military Training Area. Soltau-Fallingbostel 2005, ISBN 3-00-017185-1 .
- Rolf Keller: Soviet prisoners of war in the German Reich 1941/42. Treatment and employment between the policy of extermination and the requirements of the war economy. Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8353-0989-0 . Reviews: H-Soz-u-Kult February 9, 2012, www.kulturthemen.de February 9, 2012.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ on the term Kote see Kotten (house) and Kothe (family name)
- ↑ Stalag XI B Fallingbostel
- ↑ Stalag XI D Oerbke
- ↑ Prisoner of War team camps of military districts X and XI (on the website www.ak-regionalgeschichte.de) ( Memento of the original from April 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. The same plan as on this website is also printed in Hinrich Baumann (see literature), p. 270.
- ↑ A detailed table of the registered prisoners of war in Stalag XI B can be found in Hinrich Baumann (see literature), p. 272.
- ↑ See the chapter “Treatment and living conditions in Stalag XI B Fallingbostel” in Hinrich Baumann (see literature), pp. 275–296 and the chapters on the various prisoner groups, pp. 304–364.
- ↑ Hinrich Baumann (see literature) documents the “death march” from Poland to Oerbke on pp. 445–452.
- ↑ The course of the death marches on the Baltic Sea (on the ships Cap Arcona , Thielbeck and Athens ) is described in the section “To the Baltic Sea” in the article Death marches by concentration camp prisoners .
- ^ The liberation of the prisoner-of-war camp in Oerbke on April 16, 1945. In: Hinrich Baumann (see literature), pp. 365–376.
- ↑ M. Muchin created three memorials in 1945: the figure of a dying man in Oerbke, a grieving soldier for the Maschsee cemetery in Hanover and a crying girl for the Soviet cemetery in Belsen-Hörsten. The figures are each made of marble. see also: Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge: History and remembrance panel Hanover. A memorial for the Ehrenfriedhof , PDF document with historical photos and texts in German and Russian online (PDF; 625 kB)
- ^ Report on the Path of Remembrance on the Lieth School Bad Fallingsbostel website
- ↑ NDR-Nachrichten, 200 refugees arrived in Oerbke ( Memento from September 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Federal Real Estate Osterheide Resident Representation
- ↑ Memorial at the symbolic gate of the former prison camp
Coordinates: 52 ° 51 ' N , 9 ° 44' E