Ruhr Warrior Memorial

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Ruhr Warrior Memorial
View from the east
Explanatory board until 2011

The Ruhr fighters memorial in 1934 in the era of National Socialism erected monument in Essen district of Horst . It is located in a wooded area directly above the north bank of the Ruhr, about 100 meters southeast of Haus Horst . In 1985 it was rededicated as a memorial .

History and meaning

The memorial was built on the decisive initiative of the retired Lieutenant General Oskar von Watter from April to November 1934 according to designs by the Essen architect Paul Dietzsch (1875–1943), a former leader of the Essen Resident Services. The property was made available by the Essen entrepreneur Wilhelm Vogelsang . The inauguration took place on November 4, 1934 with a National Socialist mass parade with swastika flags and other productions. Von Watter was present at the inauguration of the monument, and the street that led directly to the memorial at the time was called General-von-Watter-Straße .

The memorial was erected in memory of fallen members of the Freikorps , resident services , Reichswehr and police units who fought against revolutionary workers in the Ruhr area from 1918 to 1920 , and in particular to fight the general strike in March 1920 and the subsequent suppression of the so-called Ruhr uprising of the miners had been involved. As the commander of Military District  VI in Münster, Watter had already undertaken military actions against striking workers in the Ruhr area in 1919 and, on behalf of the Reich government, led the civil war in the Ruhr area and the operations of the Freikorps and Reichswehr troops to put down the workers' uprising in March and April 1920 the Kapp putsch broke out. Many of the troops led by Watter sympathized, some openly, with the right-wing putschists. The fight against the workers was waged with extreme brutality and Watter exceeded his authority several times, which is why he was subsequently released from his Reichswehr command and retired.

With the erection of the monument, the National Socialists tried to enforce their view of these events for propaganda purposes, i.e. to demean the November Revolution and, as a result of it, the Weimar Republic , to take over those who died on the government and free corps side as pioneers and champions of National Socialism and the workers of the Red Ruhr Army , who had fought in March 1920 to defend the republic against the coup and then also for the implementation of more far-reaching revolutionary goals, portraying them as “Bolshevik hordes” against which Germany was defended by national forces at the time. As a result, the seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933 and their new system for “saving Germany” should be stylized and celebrated.

After 1945 the plaques with the names of the dead were removed and the facility, which was disreputed as a "Nazi monument", was largely forgotten. General von Watter died in 1939 shortly before the outbreak of war.

In 1985 the DKP called for the memorial to be torn down. The district council then dedicated the memorial to a “memorial”. The text for a memorial plaque was approved by the council in 1988 and the plaque was placed on the memorial the following year. It was demolished and stolen in 2011 by vandalism. At the beginning of November 2015, the Steeler Archive set up a newly formulated explanation board with historical images. The new explanatory board was also stolen in October 2016 and had not yet been replaced at the beginning of 2020.

The facility from the time of National Socialism is today intended as a memorial to commemorate the disputes over the establishment of the first republic in Germany.

Description of the plant

The facility is located about 25 meters above the Ruhr at a height of 79  m . It consists of 24 circular pillars or steles ("monoliths") built from Ruhr sandstone , about three meters high , which are connected at the top by stone lintels . The facility has a diameter of about twenty meters and is modeled on the Stone Age monument of Stonehenge . In the center of the circle, around a round, monumental column-like wall base, there were bronze plaques with the names of the "fallen heroes of our Ruhr struggle" (according to the Essen party newspaper of the NSDAP ), which were removed after the Second World War and are now in the Essen city archive . The monument is freely accessible.

The former General-von-Watter-Strasse ran from the monument in a north-westerly direction over the area of ​​the Hörsterfeld housing estate built in the 1970s and merged into today's Sachsenring at Dahlhauser Strasse. From 1946 this course was also called Sachsenring and was finally built over with the Hörsterfeld settlement.

To the east of the facility are the city limits to Bochum-Dahlhausen and today's Bochum Railway Museum, a few hundred meters as the crow flies from the memorial .

literature

  • Alfons Kenkmann: cult of the dead - tradition - hustle and bustle - transfer. The checkered history of the “Ruhrkämper Memorial”, in: Essener Contributions , 2009, No. 122, pp. 277–296

Web links

Commons : Ruhrkämpferehrenmal  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
  • Text and pictures of the new explanation board produced by Steeler Archiv eV (11/2015): (PDF; 665 kB)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See memorial plaque 2015 and Holger Krüssmann: Architektur in Essen 1900–1960. Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2012, p. 39 f .; Life data can be read on a  bronze bust of the architect ( memento from September 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ).
  2. ^ Andreas Jordan: The Red Ruhr Army in the Ruhr War 1920. Online publication, July 2010. Retrieved on August 29, 2016.
  3. ^ Statement by the DKP on the right-wing extremist Easter meetings of NPD- related groups at the Ruhrkämpferehrenmal (published on the Essen platform on April 6, 2012); contains a full text citation of the application from 1985. Retrieved on August 30, 2016.
  4. ↑ a b Thorsten Schabelon: The forgotten Nazi memorial on the Ruhr . In: WAZ , November 5, 2015, accessed on February 21, 2018.
  5. ↑ Michael Heiße: The theft of the plaque at the Horster monument is not an isolated case . In: WAZ, November 2, 2016, accessed on March 1, 2020.
  6. ↑ Photo of the destroyed sign posts from January 15, 2020 on Wikimedia Commons .
  7. ↑ See text on the explanation board in the Steeler Archives; there it says in conclusion:
    The memorial is intended as a memorial to commemorate the disputes surrounding the establishment of the first republic in Germany.
  8. ^ Erwin Dickhoff: Essener streets . Ed .: City of Essen - Historical Association for City and Monastery of Essen. Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8375-1231-1 .

Coordinates: 51 ° 25 ′ 54 ″  N , 7 ° 7 ′ 5 ″  E