Schlageter National Monument

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Schlageter Memorial (1934)

The Schlageter National Monument was a monument designed by the architect Clemens Holzmeister in Düsseldorf - Derendorf .

background

The cenotaph commemorates the militant activist Albert Leo Schlageter , who was sentenced to death by a French military tribunal on May 9, 1923, and executed on May 26, 1923 , during the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr for espionage and several explosive attacks. The location of the memorial was on the Golzheimer Heide, north of the Düsseldorf North Cemetery , about 50 m from the place of his shooting . The memorial, planned since 1926 and inaugurated on May 23, 1931, was a stage-like arrangement of terraces arranged in a circle with a 27 m high steel cross , which was erected on a 4 m high stone plinth above an underground memorial room. It was surrounded by a large parade area.

During the Weimar Republic and during the National Socialist era, it developed into a prominent political place of remembrance and a place of political death cult . In doing so, Schlageter's death was mythicized by various social, mostly right-wing political circles, and he himself was mythicized as a hero and martyr , and was used in particular for purposes of national-conservative and national-socialist propaganda . The initiative for the memorial came from a circle around the former mayor of Poznan and Düsseldorf lawyer Ernst Wilms . Hermann Göring , Prime Minister of the Free State of Prussia , declared the monument a national shrine on May 28, 1933 . In 1946 it was demolished by decision of the Düsseldorf city council. The Three Norns memorial designed by Jupp Rübsam was built in its place in 1958 .

history

To the north of the Düsseldorf North Cemetery, barracks and ammunition stores were located on the site of a former Zeppelin airfield for Belgian and French military units that had confiscated this site from 1921 to 1925 as part of the occupation of the Ruhr . On May 26, 1923, the activist Albert Leo Schlageter was fusilized on this site after he had been sentenced to death by a French military court. The conviction and execution were preceded by acts of paramilitary sabotage by the " Organization Heinz ", which was involved in the "Ruhrkampf", on railway lines and his arrest on April 7, 1923. Shortly after the execution, the place was marked by a simple wooden cross made of birch trunks, then by a new cross made of oak with the inscription "Albert Leo Schlageter was shot by the French on May 26, 1923". This cross was sawed up by strangers on March 15, 1929 and stolen. A “memory oak”, which was set in 1927, was also felled. Soon after Schlageter's execution, a “Schlageter cult” developed, especially in the right-wing spectrum of the Völkische Movement , the German National People's Party and the circles of national conservatism up to the German Center Party , which saw his “sacrificial death” as a “crystallization point for the far widespread rejection of the Versailles Treaty ”( Christian Fuhrmeister ). Adolf Hitler mentioned Schlageter in his program publication Mein Kampf , published in 1925, and constructed him in a hero triad with Andreas Hofer and Johann Philipp Palm . In 1933, a year in which the publications on the subject of “Schlageter” skyrocketed, the NSDAP succeeded in “ excluding competing interpretations of Catholics (including in particular the Cartell Association of Catholic German Student Associations ), the Stahlhelm , the Young German Order and other groups and the myth von Schlageter as the 'First Soldier of the Third Reich ' to spread and enforce widely ”(Fuhrmeister).

Origin and development until 1933

On January 12, 1927, a "Committee for the Establishment of a Schlageter Monument eV" was founded in the Düsseldorf Ibach House from a bourgeois-dominated group of supporters of a larger memorial in Düsseldorf, which had come together in 1926. Your spokesman was Ernst Wilms . The chairman of the committee had been Max Schlenker since 1929 , who was also the managing director of the influential " Langnam Association ". At the beginning the debate was about erecting a monument in the city center or on the Golzheimer Heide. The committee, which in addition to Schlenker also included the businessman Constans Heinersdorff (1874-1936), the Düsseldorf mayor Robert Lehr and the industrialists Fritz Thyssen and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach , decided to use the design by the Catholic Austrian architect Clemens Holzmeister on the To realize Golzheimer Heide. From 1928 onwards, Holzmeister headed a master workshop for architecture at the Düsseldorf Art Academy . His abstract design, which he created in 1929 in close cooperation with Schlenker and Otto Petersen , envisaged a stage architecture terraced in circles and semicircles according to the scheme of an amphitheater , whose interior circle , which is 4 meters deep and 28 meters wide, provides access to one Memorial room. The memorial room was equipped with three memorial stones as a “crypt chamber”. In the axis of the entrance, the main memorial stone for Schlageter was placed in a niche in the memorial room. It bore the inscription "Here fell, shot on French orders, on May 26, 1923 Albert Leo Schlageter for freedom and peace on the Ruhr and Rhine." Two side niches on two further memorial stones showed the names, places of residence and occupations of the other "141 victims of the Ruhrkampf ". An altar-like stone plinth ("stone sarcophagus") rose above the memorial room and carried a 27-meter high Latin cross made of "Ruhr steel". On the 4 meter high and 7 meter wide stone pedestal, the inscription "Albert Leo Schlageter" was attached to the inside and the words "Den Helden des Ruhrkampf" on the outside. According to Holzmeister, the cross should stand as “a symbol of the West and its struggles and suffering, a symbol of the oath, a symbol of the millions of crosses on the graves of the fallen, but for the believer above all a symbol of the only consolation and reference to the afterlife, not least but also a symbol of reconciliation ”. Schlenker and Peter Dierichsweiler , another member of the committee, explained the purpose of the memorial as follows: “The building idea of ​​the memorial contains the connection between the two closely related thoughts of remembering Schlageter and the many victims of the Rhine-Ruhr struggle and the gathering of masses for consecration Community honor of the memory of the heroes ”.

After the last occupation troops had left the Rhineland in 1930, the foundation stone was laid on March 11, 1931. In a speech, Schlenker explained that the monument should be “a national monument for all Germans”. The inauguration took place on Whit Saturday, May 23, 1931, three days before the eighth anniversary of Schlageter's death, in a celebration with tens of thousands of participants, among them Gottfried Treviranus , the Reich Minister for the Occupied Territories as a representative of the Reich Government , and Vice President Siegfried von Kardorff as Representatives of the Reichstag , the Reich Chancellor a. D. Wilhelm Cuno and the former Reichsminister. D. Karl Jarres and Johann Becker .

Development from 1933

On the ten-year anniversary of May 26, 1933, marches and celebrations took place at the memorial under the direction of the National Socialist Gauleitung Düsseldorf , hailed in the press as the "largest celebration in the Rhineland, if not in Germany". The main speaker at the main event on May 28, 1933 was Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach . The memorial was "officially" recognized as a national monument by the Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring , who also gave a speech . This time, in which the Nazi propaganda put the "Schlageter cult" completely in their service, went hand in hand with the forced self-dissolution of the monument committee.

After work on equipping the memorial with horticultural facilities had already begun in 1932, the Düsseldorf Gauleiter Friedrich Karl Florian made the decision in 1933 to design the memorial into “a monumental place of consecration for the German people”. A "Schlageterpark" was to be created which, in addition to the expansion of the memorial into a " Thingstätte " and an open-air stage for 100,000 people, provided an exhibition area with 70 hectares and a "stadium park" of 60 hectares. The Rheinstadion from 1925/1926 was to be integrated into the “Stadium Park” . A driving school should also be planned. In May 1934 the Hitler Youth announced a competition for a “Schlageterforum”, for which 160 designs were received. The tender program specified that “the huge facility” should be built over a length of 1.5 kilometers between the “Schlageterkreuz” and the Rhine , “the German stream of fate”. The jury, which included Peter Grund and Albert Speer , awarded the plans of Erich zu Putlitz , Karl Wach and Heinrich Rosskotten, and Kurt Marohn and Werner Gabriel (1906–1998) each with first prize. The designs by Heinrich Timmermann, Sepp Spannmacher, Wilhelm Seidensticker and Hans Wende as well as Franz Roeckle were purchased . Other architects who participated were Helmut Hentrich and Hans Heuser, Hans Junghanns , Ingo Beucker (1906–1990), Walter Köngeter and Walter Furthmann . As a result of the competition, the planning ideas developed in such a way that in the following period there was talk of planning a "Schlageterstadt". This marked a large-scale urban reorganization of the north of the city of Düsseldorf, the concept of which Gauleiter Florian placed in the hands of Peter Grund, who rose to become NSDAP consultant for urban development in 1935. Although the plans for a “Schlageterforum” developed from scratch had been approved by Adolf Hitler, they were never implemented for financial reasons. Therefore, from 1935 onwards, Grund and the Gauleitung pursued the approach of realizing part of the planning as part of an industrial and trade fair. A large-scale urban development was created as the imperial exhibition “Schaffendes Volk” by 1937, which understood the Schlageter national monument as a connection and focal point of a monumental axis up to the Rhine.

After the Second World War , the city council of Düsseldorf decided to demolish the monument without the British occupying power having asked the city to do so. As a “memorial for the victims of the war and the National Socialist tyranny”, the Three Norns designed by Jupp Rübsam was erected in its place in 1958 .

See also

literature

  • Stephan Zwicker: “National Martyrs”: Albert Leo Schlageter and Julius Fučík. Hero cult, propaganda and culture of remembrance . Verlag Schöningh, Paderborn 2006 ( digitized version ).
  • Christian Fuhrmeister : A martyr on the Zugspitze? Lightbulb crosses, image propaganda and other medializations of the cult of the dead around Albert Leo Schlageter in the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism . In: zeitenblicke 3 (2004), No. 1 ( online ).
  • Stefanie Schäfers: From the Werkbund to the four-year plan. The exhibition "Schaffendes Volk", Düsseldorf 1937 . In: Düsseldorfer Geschichtsverein (Hrsg.): Sources and research on the history of the Lower Rhine , Volume 4 (= contributions from the Research Center for Architectural History and Monument Preservation of the Bergische Universität-Gesamtthochschule Wuppertal, Volume XI), Droste-Verlag, Düsseldorf 2001, ISBN 3-7700 -3045-1 ( online (excerpt) ).
  • Ludwig Hügen: Was Albert Leo Schlageter in the wrong direction in March 1923? . In: Heimatbuch des Kreis Viersen, Vol. 48 (1997), pp. 206-210.
  • Michael Knauff: The Schlageter National Monument on the Golzheimer Heide in Düsseldorf . In: Geschichte im Westen , No. 2, Volume 10 (1995), pp. 168–191 ( PDF ).
  • Lothar Schiefer: The Schlageter Monument. From the soldier's grave to the forum . In: Michael Hütt et al. (Ed.): Unhappy the country that needs heroes. Suffering and dying in the war memorials of the First and Second World Wars . Studies on Art and Cultural History, Volume 8, Jonas Verlag, Marburg 1990, ISBN 978-3-92256-191-0 , pp. 50–55.
  • Alfred E. Cornebise: Düsseldorf's Schlageter Monument - A Focus on the Martyr as Political Cause . Asian Journal of European Studies 1.1 (1976), pp. 1-21.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ “Schlageter's place of execution on Golzheimerheide in Düsseldorf” , image of a picture postcard issued by the “Committee of the Schlageter National Monument ” in Düsseldorf, website in the portal bildpostkarten.uni-osnabrueck.de , accessed on September 6, 2016
  2. ^ Stephan Zwicker: "National Martyrs": Albert Leo Schlageter and Julius Fučík. Hero cult, propaganda and culture of remembrance . Verlag Schöningh, Paderborn 2006, p. 92 ( digitized version )
  3. ↑ Michael Knauff, p. 179
  4. ↑ Michael Knauff, p. 180
  5. ^ Eduard Lyonel Wehner : Competition Schlageter Forum in Düsseldorf . In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung . 54th year, issue 51 from December 19, 1934, p. 789 f. ( PDF )
  6. ↑ Hans-Peter Görgen: Düsseldorf and National Socialism. Study on the history of a large city in the “Third Reich” . L. Schwann Verlag, Düsseldorf 1968, p. 150
  7. ↑ Stephan Zwicker, p. 94 ( digitized version )

Coordinates: 51 ° 15 ′ 29.4 "  N , 6 ° 45 ′ 49.9"  E