Ratingsee settlement

Roggenkamp street in the Ratingsee settlement in Meiderich (August 2014)

Backs of some houses with small gardens opposite the playground

The Ratingsee settlement in Duisburg - Meiderich was built from 1927 to 1928 on the area of a filled-in lake near the now disused Ruhrort marshalling yard and the Rhine-Herne Canal .

After the Dickelsbach settlement (1926) in Wanheimerort and the Diergardt settlement (1927) at the parallel port in Neuenkamp , it was the third type house settlement in the New Building style established by the Duisburg City Planning Department with its employees Karl Pregizer, Hermann Bräuhäuser and Heinrich Bähr and built by GEBAG (Duisburger Gemeinnützige Baugesellschaft AG). The reason for the city's involvement was the withdrawal of mining and other large companies from housing construction and the housing shortage after World War I, inflation and the occupation of the Ruhr. The target group of the so-called Duisburg “type plan” were the poor and large families.

The 215 single-family row houses, designed according to revolutionary principles at the time, had three bedrooms, a kitchen-cum-living room as a single-storey extension to the rear, a bathroom, a toilet, on the ground floor a loggia with stairs to the garden and on the first floor in the master bedroom a balcony above the kitchen-living room. The residential units had a floor area of 4.30 m × 10.20 m on the two floors and a living space of 52 square meters. In contrast to the previous settlements, the ground floors in Ratingsee were raised, so that well-lit cellars were created, in the rear part of which there was a bathing niche with a bathtub.

Brick was used as a building material as visible brickwork. The strictly cubic, flat-roofed residential units dispense with any decoration and show the functional structure on the outside of the facade. They were arranged in elongated double rows, broken up into nine to ten residential units, with internal gardens of around 50 m². The two longer and two shorter double rows fan out from the Heukamp in a north-south orientation. In the center of the settlement there is a large children's playground right from the start, and another one was planned at the north end. Eight single-storey retail units were built on Heukamp and Zoppenbrückstrasse to supply the population, parts of which have been converted into garages and others are now used as common rooms. A garden tavern was planned in the southeast corner of the settlement, this part is still undeveloped today.

During the Second World War, some houses were destroyed by bombs and the vacant lots were closed by apartment buildings. The entire settlement with the 184 preserved houses, the arrangement of rows of houses, fire protection walls, hedges and tree planting, farm and footpaths as well as the central playground and the Heukamp square was considered in 1998 as a "significant example of a functionalist settlement of the 1920s" and "outstanding Document for the local political commitment of the progressive Duisburg city administration ”placed under monument protection.

On June 14, 2008, the residents celebrated the 80th anniversary of their settlement with a district festival.

As part of Ruhr.2010 , the Ratingsee settlement took part in the Route of Living Culture project . Today the settlement is presented on an information stele on the Route of Living Culture.

Ratingsee satellite camp

In Meiderich-Ratingsee was established in October 1942 by the SS Construction Brigade I immediately adjacent to the residential area in the Westender road / corner Kornstraße a KZ set -Außenlager in which 400 prisoners from the Sachsenhausen in 10 barracks were housed; the camp was later subordinated to the Buchenwald concentration camp . Another sub-camp of SS Construction Brigade I with 600 prisoners existed in Düsseldorf - Stoffeln .

The prisoners had to repair damage caused by bomb attacks in Duisburg. While working in the rubble, the prisoners were constantly exposed to the danger of undiscovered bomb and grenade duds. On April 27, 1943, the Ratingsee satellite concentration camp was completely destroyed in a bomb attack on Duisburg, killing 50 prisoners.

To commemorate the fate of the prisoners, a commemorative plaque was set in the ground in 1984 on the forecourt of the Meiderich sports facility of the MSV Duisburg . In 1998, a new memorial plaque was unveiled on the wall of the Church of St. Michael on Von-der-Mark-Strasse in Meiderich.

Individual evidence

↑ Monument entry of the city of Duisburg on the settlement
↑ Route of living culture: "Route of living culture" after 2010
↑ See Ratingsee concentration camp ( online ( memento from November 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) at www.geschichtsorte-nrw.de of the DGB-Jugend NRW ; memento at archive.is; accessed on January 2, 2018).
↑ See Karola Fings: SS building brigades and SS railway building brigades in the Rhineland and Westphalia . In: Jan Erik Schulte (Ed.): Concentration camps in the Rhineland and in Westphalia 1933–1945 . Pp. 165-178, especially p. 168 ( Google Books ).
↑ See Karola Fings: The SS Building Brigade I in Düsseldorf and Duisburg . In: War, Society and KZ: Himmler's SS construction brigades . Ferdinand Schönigh, Paderborn 2005, p. 58f ( Google Books ).