Schwedendamm

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“Demolition of the fortress Princely Head Instead of Wolffenbütel, like those in the name of Kay [serlicher] May [estät], besieged by the Count of Pappenheim in 1627.” (from Theatrum Europaeum ). View from the north. Clearly recognizable: the Oker , which has overflowed its banks, and the dam (number “10” ). In the background is the enclosed, defending Wolfenbüttel. Bottom left Klein Stöckheim , Pappenheim's headquarters (number “6” ).
Information board on the former Schwedendamm in Wolfenbüttel 2019

The Schwedendamm was a dam that was built during the Thirty Years' War to dam the Oker and so flood the Lower Saxon fortress Wolfenbüttel and thereby capture it.

The first dam was built in 1627 by the besieging troops of the Catholic League under General Sergeant Gottfried Heinrich zu Pappenheim . They managed to cause a prolonged flood in the city, as a result of which they succeeded in conquering. In 1641 Wolfenbüttel was besieged again, this time by Welfisch- Swedish troops of the Protestant Union . They used the dam that was largely still in place to re-submerge the city. In contrast to the siege of 1627, "the Swedes" did not succeed in recapturing Wolfenbüttel. The dam has since been referred to as the Schwedendamm . Its remains were only removed in 1923/24.

history

First dam 1627

Gottfried Heinrich zu Pappenheim

The siege of Wolfenbüttel by the imperial troops began in the summer of 1627. The city's ramparts and defenses, built according to the latest Dutch fortress technology, were equipped with 190 guns of various calibres , the military crew consisted of 1,500–1800 infantrymen and 500 riders. Wolfenbüttel was one of the best-defended cities in Lower Saxony in the 17th century and one of the strongest in the entire Holy Roman Empire . It was therefore considered to be almost impregnable. Since the summer of 1625, the city also had a royal Danish bodyguard , which was under the command of Lohes and that of the Danish governor Count Philipp Reinhard I of Solms-Hohensolms (a distant relative of Pappenheim).

The imperial army had estimated a troop strength of 10,000 men and a duration of siege of at least six months for the siege of Wolfenbüttel. After Pappenheim had received the order from Tilly to conquer Wolfenbüttel, he joined the besiegers on August 28th. Pappenheim's headquarters were between Braunschweig and Wolfenbüttel in the village of Klein Stöckheim . In September, work began on a dam, which was to dam the Oker, which flows through Wolfenbüttel, four kilometers downstream, thereby flooding the fortress. Its purpose was to force the Danish fortress garrison to surrender.

In order to be able to build the dam, Pappenheim wanted to hire 20 carpenters and 1,000 farmers from the city of Braunschweig for relief services, but did not receive them because Braunschweig sympathized with the besieged Wolfenbüttel. Only Goslar , which was well-disposed towards the Catholic Emperor , provided the required labor and tools. The timber had to be brought from the Harz region . The dam was finally 300 meters wide and ran across the river between Groß Stöckheim and Leiferde . After the river overflowed, Wolfenbüttel was under water for several weeks. B. the town hall and the castle barracks (today's armory), in which the water was 1.60 m high. The prolonged flooding caused houses to collapse and the city's population could only get around by barge. The mills and bakeries stood still or under water, so that people suffered hunger and food from Braunschweig had to be smuggled into the city . The floods drove the bodies of the dead and starved among the rubble of collapsed houses. Finally, after 114 days of siege, the starved garrison of the last Danish fortress surrendered on December 19, 1627. On December 23, the Danish garrison withdrew with military honors and imperial troops immediately occupied the city. Welf Duke Friedrich Ulrich was granted unrestricted access and the citizens of Wolfenbüttel were granted freedom to practice their religion according to the Augsburg confession .

For his services in the conquest of Wolfenbüttel, Pappenheim was elevated to the rank of imperial count in 1628 . Wolfenbüttel then remained in the hands of the Catholics. Pappenheim initially handed over the command to Gottfried Huyn von Geleen . It was not until 1634 at the latest that Colonel and later Sergeant General Johannes Ernst Freiherr von Reuschenberg zu Setterich defended the fortress against the Protestant Union . In 1643 he finally handed Wolfenbüttel over to August II (Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel) .

Second dam 1641

In the Peine Agreement concluded on April 21, 1640 , the Guelph Dukes Georg von Braunschweig-Calenberg (since 1631 leader of the German-Swedish army in Lower Saxony and Westphalia ) and August II of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel undertook to give up their previously practiced neutrality and together to raise an army of 9,000 men under the leadership of Duke George and to enter into an alliance with the Swedes. When Duke Georg died unexpectedly in April 1641, Johann von Darmstadt was appointed as his successor as commanding general. Since February 1641 (according to other reports before the beginning of winter 1640) Wolfenbüttel was besieged by six Lüneburg regiments under Lieutenant General Johann Kaspar Klitzing .

In the summer 3,000 farmers from the surrounding area were brought in to repair the dam, which was still partially preserved from 1627, over several months and to raise it by a further four meters. During this construction work, the combined Brunswick-Swedish troops under Carl Gustav Wrangel and Hans Christoph von Königsmarck, together with French and Weimar units, faced the advancing 22,000 men of an Imperial Bavarian army under Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria on June 19, 1641 between the villages of Fümmelse , Thiede and Steterburg in the battle of Wolfenbüttel against. The Austrian troops were defeated with 2,000 deaths compared to 360–400 on the Brunswick-Swedish side. Nevertheless, "the Swedes" did not succeed in taking the city.

On June 24th, the dam was closed and Wolfenbüttel was flooded. For several months the water was less than three feet high in the city. The pent-up Oker soon caused a considerable water shortage in Braunschweig, north of Wolfenbüttels, so that z. B. the municipal mills no longer operated and thus no grain could be ground to supply the population. This in turn led to the dam being broken on September 1, 1641. The pent-up floods then poured into the city of Braunschweig, which in turn led to major floods there; the water is said to have stood one meter high on the Hagenmarkt .

Effects

August von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, called the Younger

Although the Union had not succeeded in conquering Wolfenbüttel, the fighting meant that the Welfs and the Kaiser began separate peace negotiations in Goslar on September 22, 1641 , which led to the Goslar Accord on January 16, 1642 , which in turn April 19 of the year in the major recess was confirmed. The recession stipulated that the Brunswick dukes would no longer enter into alliances with enemies of the empire, that all troops that did not serve to defend state fortresses would be dissolved, that the bishopric of Hildesheim , which had been reduced in size since the feud of the monastery in favor of Braunschweig and Calenberg, would be restored and that the duke would be restored August Wolfenbüttel received back as his residence . This ended the Thirty Years' War in the Braunschweig region, apart from minor fighting.

Both the Wolfenbüttel fortress and the surrounding areas and villages were victims of marauding soldiers on both sides during the war years between 1627 and 1643 (the withdrawal of the Catholic troops from the city) . Destruction and devastation from fighting, looting and flooding were everywhere. In the church book of the village Halchter , which today belongs to Wolfenbüttel, there is an entry in 1627: In this year this village, along with the other surrounding areas, was burned down by the Count von Solms and most of them fled to Wolfenbüttel during the detention, some of them in Braunschweig ...

The flooding of Wolfenbüttel in 1641 was recorded in four copperplate engravings from the Theatrum Europaeum attributed to Matthäus Merian .

Although the remains of the Schwedendamm were removed in 1923/24, it is still partially visible in some places today. It runs north of Wolfenbüttel near Groß Stöckheim directly in front of the A 36 , which has been indicated by an information board on the pedestrian cycle path in the Okeraue since 2019. As a reminder, two streets in the area have corresponding names: in the north of Wolfenbüttel “Am Schwedendamm” and in the south of Braunschweig “Schwedendamm”.

literature

  • Wilhelm Bornstedt : Chronicle of Stöckheim. Settlement geography, social and cultural history of a Braunschweig village. ACO-Verlags- und Druck-GmbH, Braunschweig 1967.
  • Horst-Rüdiger Jarck , Gerhard Schildt (Hrsg.): Braunschweigische Landesgeschichte. A region looking back over the millennia. Appelhans, Braunschweig 2000, ISBN 3-930292-28-9 .
  • Horst-Rüdiger Jarck, Dieter Lent et al. (Ed.): Braunschweigisches Biographisches Lexikon. 8th to 18th centuries. Appelhans, Braunschweig 2006, ISBN 3-937664-46-7 .

Web links

Commons : Schwedendamm  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Garzmann, Schuegraf, Pingel (ed.): Braunschweiger Stadtlexikon - supplementary volume , p. 121
  2. ↑ Horst-Rüdiger Jarck: Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel in the Thirty Years War , In: Jörg Leuschner , Karl Heinrich Kaufhold , Claudia Märtl (ed.): The economic and social history of the Braunschweigische Land from the Middle Ages to the present , Volume 2: Early modern times , Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 2008, ISBN 978-3-487-13597-7 , p. 27
  3. ↑ Horst-Rüdiger Jarck, Dieter Lent et al. (Ed.): Braunschweigisches Biographisches Lexikon: 8th to 18th centuries , p. 548
  4. ↑ Horst-Rüdiger Jarck, Dieter Lent et al. (Ed.): Braunschweigisches Biographisches Lexikon: 8th to 18th centuries , p. 659
  5. ^ Barbara Stadler: Pappenheim and the time of the Thirty Years' War . Gemsberg-Verlag, Winterthur 1991. (p. 256)
  6. ^ Horst-Rüdiger Jarck: Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel in the Thirty Years' War. In: Jörg Leuschner, Karl Heinrich Kaufhold, Claudia Märtl (Hrsg.): The economic and social history of the Braunschweigische Land from the Middle Ages to the present , Volume 2: Early modern times , Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 2008, ISBN 978-3-487-13597 -7 , p. 28.
  7. ↑ a b Görges , Spehr , Fuhse : Patriotic Stories and Memories of the Lands of Braunschweig and Hanover , III. Edition, Volume I: Braunschweig , Braunschweig 1925, pp. 186f
  8. ↑ Friedrich Thöne: Wolfenbüttel - Spirit and Splendor of an Old Residence , Munich 1963, p. 97
  9. ↑ Werner Spieß : History of the city of Braunschweig in the post-Middle Ages. From the end of the Middle Ages to the end of urban freedom 1491–1671 , 2 volumes, Braunschweig 1966, volume 1, p. 187
  10. ^ NN: Collector, Prince, Scholar - Herzog August zu Braunschweig and Lüneburg, 1579–1666 , catalog for the Lower Saxony State Exhibition in Wolfenbüttel, May 26 to October 31, 1979, Herzog August Bibliothek, p. 92
  11. ↑ Reuschenberg, Bernd: "Jesus Maria and no quarters!" Johannes Ernst Freiherr von Reuschenberg zu Setterich raised to the status of imperial baron in: Yearbook No. 2 / 2011-12 of the Baesweiler History Association, 2012, p. 33.
  12. ↑ a b c d Horst-Rüdiger Jarck, Gerhard Schildt (ed.): Braunschweigische Landesgeschichte. Millennium review of a region , p. 517
  13. ↑ Horst-Rüdiger Jarck: Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel in the Thirty Years War , In: Jörg Leuschner, Karl Heinrich Kaufhold, Claudia Märtl (ed.): The economic and social history of the Braunschweigisches Land from the Middle Ages to the present , Volume 2: Early modern times , Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 2008, ISBN 978-3-487-13597-7 , p. 34
  14. ↑ a b Werner Spieß: History of the city of Braunschweig in the post-Middle Ages. From the end of the Middle Ages to the end of urban freedom 1491–1671 , 2 volumes, Braunschweig 1966, volume 1, p. 199
  15. ↑ Werner Spieß: History of the city of Braunschweig in the post-Middle Ages. From the end of the Middle Ages to the end of urban freedom 1491–1671 , 2 volumes, Braunschweig 1966, volume 1, p. 200
  16. ↑ Horst-Rüdiger Jarck, Dieter Lent et al. (Ed.): Braunschweigisches Biographisches Lexikon: 8th to 18th century. P. 528.
  17. ^ Volker Rusteberg: Geschichte des Dorfes Halchter , In: Contributions to the history of the city of Wolfenbüttel , Heft 3, Wolfenbüttel 1988; quoted from Halchter in the 30 Years War  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.halchter.de  
  18. ^ Wilhelm Bornstedt: Chronicle of Stöckheim. Settlement geography, social and cultural history of a Braunschweig village. , P. 202