Schifflersgrund
The Schifflersgrund is a depression that is topographically located between the villages of Asbach-Sickenberg ( Thuringia ) and Bad Sooden-Allendorf ( Hesse ). Until 1990 the inner German border between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany ran here and thus the border between the Warsaw Pact and NATO .
Geographical location
The Schifflersgrund is a depression running in the direction of the Walsetal just under two kilometers northeast of Bad Sooden-Allendorf. The area is located on one of the above Werratales situated red sandstone plateau below the Sick mountain (294.5 m) and the Heier head (286.1 m). The northern foothills of the Gobert with the Dietzenröder Stein run further east . Naturally, the Schifflersgrund belongs to the Sooden-Allendorfer Werra Valley and is now part of the German Green Belt .
The place can be reached by traffic via the state roads L 1003 and L 2012 from Wahlhausen to Sickenberg and the L 3239 and L 2012 from Bad Sooden-Allendorf to Sickenberg. The district road K 59 from Allendorf in the direction of Sickenberg leads directly past the valley.
history
.jpg)
The Schifflersgrund is an area characterized by agriculture and forestry away from larger settlements. For centuries it had been in the border area of different rulers, such as the Hessian landgraves and the Electoral Mainz Eichsfeld . From 1803 it belonged to the Electorate of Hesse and from 1866 to the Prussian Province of Hesse-Nassau . After the end of the war in 1945, the Schifflersgrund came under American occupation to the State of Hesse , the neighboring Prussian Eichsfeld came to Thuringia .
On September 17, 1945 , high-ranking American and Soviet officers met in the village of Wanfried , not far from the demarcation line, to resolve a dispute between the Allies, which had a lasting impact on the future in the affected regions. The railway connection Bremerhaven – Hanover – Göttingen to Bebra, which was important for the Western Allies, ran below the Hanstein . On this section of the route, popularly known as the whiskey-vodka line , the trains crossed the Soviet occupation zone over a length of almost three kilometers . Due to Soviet controls, there were obstacles in the train traffic, there was a certain dependence of the American armed forces on Soviet goodwill. At the insistence of the Americans, an exchange of territory was decided in the Wanfried Agreement . Five Hessian and two Thuringian villages changed their "occupation zone affiliation". The former Hessian communities Asbach , Sickenberg , Vatterode , Hennigerode and Weidenbach and thus also the Schifflersgrund belonged to the Soviet occupation zone and thus to the area of the later GDR. From 1952 to 1990 the inner German border ran in this area and since then the Hessian-Thuringian border.
Forced evictions
The years 1952 and 1961 were of equally decisive importance for the residents of the border area. On May 26, 1952, the GDR government issued an "Ordinance on Measures on the Demarcation Line between the German Democratic Republic and the Western Occupation Zones of Germany". Under the propagandistic pretext of an acute threat to the GDR from the Federal Republic and its allies, a day later, on May 27, the Ministry for State Security issued a "Police Ordinance on the Introduction of a Special Order on the Demarcation Line". A control strip was created over the entire length of the later border immediately in front of the demarcation line and the subsequent 500 meter wide area was designated as a protective strip. It was joined by the exclusion zone at a depth of about five kilometers . This classification remained in place until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The places Asbach-Sickenberg, Wahlhausen and Lindewerra were communities in the protective strip and thus hardly accessible for strangers. In 1952, forced resettlement was carried out in all places on the protective strip and the exclusion zone. Thousands of people had to pack the bare essentials and leave their homes within a very short time. This process ran under the code name Aktion Verziefer . Something similar happened in 1961 after the construction of the wall began under the code name Aktion Kornblume .
In 1952 three families from Asbach-Sickenberg were forcibly evacuated, two other families and one man managed to escape to the West. During the second resettlement operation in 1961, a family was expelled from the village. Due to the many restrictions in the protective strip and the remote location, the old road connections to the nearby Bad Sooden-Allendorf no longer existed, other families left the two districts, in 1990 11 houses were empty. The upper and lower mills located on the border at Hainsbach in Asbach were demolished in the 1950s for the expansion of the border installations.
Escape
On March 29, 1982, the 34-year-old melioration worker Heinz-Josef Große died while trying to escape from the GDR directly in Schifflersgrund. As a civilian, he worked right on the border for years and carried out earthworks that day. When the guarding border guards had left in an off-road vehicle, Grosse drove to a point on the border fence where he could lay the boom of his front loader over the fence secured with SM-70 mines. He climbed onto the boom, jumped over the fence, and tried to reach the boundary line over a steep bank. The two border guards hurried back noticed the vehicle and the fugitive. Targeted machine gun fire followed warning shots. Heinz-Josef Große was fatally shot in the back. The burial took place in his home parish Thalwend . In the censored obituary notice, no formulations could be used that would allow conclusions to be drawn about an unnatural death.
The border guards who shot the great were sentenced to probation by the Mühlhausen district court in 1996 . The escape of Heinz-Josef Große was dealt with in the contemporary witness report "The Power of Love" by the documentary filmmaker Martin Schülbe.
Border Museum
Not far from these eventful locations, the Schifflersgrund Border Museum was built in 1990/1991 . It was the first of its kind in the reunified Federal Republic. The association “Arbeitskreis Grenzinformation e. V. ”had set itself the goal of preserving some historically significant fragments of the former“ anti-fascist protective wall ”and making them accessible to posterity. This has resulted in a complete museum complex that provides detailed information about the aforementioned events and is also used as a place for learning and further training. In 2013 the museum had about 45,000 visitors.
Since August 2009, the sculpture group "Burned Dreams" by the wood sculptor Sebastian Seiffert has been commemorating the 26 deaths between 1945 and 1989 on the Hessian-Thuringian border.
Web links
- Literature on Schifflersgrund in the catalog of the German National Library
- Website of the border museum Schifflersgrund
Individual evidence
- ↑ Edith Behrends, Jakob Eisler: Between memory and new commonality. Border Museum Schifflersgrund. Bad Sooden-Allendorf 2016, pp. 61–63
- ↑ Volker Große, Gunter Römer: Lost cultural sites in Eichsfeld 1945 to 1989 A documentation . Eichsfeld Verlag, Heilbad Heiligenstadt, 2006, pages 16-17.
- ^ Anne Kaminsky (Ed.): Places of Remembrance: Memorial signs, memorials and museums on the dictatorship in the Soviet occupation zone and GDR . Links, 2007, ISBN 978-3-86153-443-3 , pp. 530 f .
- ↑ 45,000 visitors to the Grenzmuseum Schifflersgrund thueringer-allgemeine.de on January 13, 2014, accessed on January 25, 2016
- ↑ “On the other side” A photo story about the Schifflersgrund border area, page 31
Coordinates: 51 ° 17 ′ 7 ″ N , 9 ° 59 ′ 37 ″ E