Red Tower of Death

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Red Tower of Death

The Red Tower of Death (Rudá věž smrti) is a former processing plant near Ostrov nad Ohří south of Jáchymov in the Bohemian part of the Ore Mountains . In the facility, uranium ore was sorted and prepared for transport to the Soviet Union . The remaining parts of the complex have been a national cultural monument of the Czech Republic since 2009 .

history

From 1951 to 1956 the plant was the central processing and sorting plant for the uranium mining areas of the former Czechoslovakia . Here the uranium ores were prepared for transport to the Soviet Union. The processing plant was part of the Vykmanov II labor camp, which was built in 1951. Almost only political prisoners were employed here. The tower served as a storage bunker. The ores were crushed and sorted without tools. The dust produced during work, which, like the ores, was radioactive, got into the respiratory tract of the unprotected prisoners. But the dust also penetrated into the camp itself, which sealed the fate of all those present even without a death sentence.

today

The national cultural monument serves as a symbol for the suffering of political prisoners who were imprisoned under inhumane conditions in the labor camps around Jáchymov. The objects still preserved are the only remaining parts of a uranium ore processing plant in the Ore Mountains and are part of the Ore Mountains Mining Region of the UNESCO World Heritage . The site is not freely accessible.

literature

Ulrich Möckel : The Red Tower of Death , in: The Border Crosser - Information from the Bohemian Ore Mountains , June 2018 edition, p. 13f. ( PDF online edition )

Web links

Commons : Věž smrti  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Document of the National Monument Office of the Czech Republic (Národní památkový ústav), online at: iispp.npu.cz / ...
  2. ↑ http://www.taz.de/!5427046
  3. ↑ Report in Grenzgänger , No. 72 from June 2018, p. 14 , accessed on July 10, 2019

Coordinates: 50 ° 19 ′ 44 ″  N , 12 ° 57 ′ 12.4 ″  E