Theresienturm
The Theresienturm is a high-volume bunker on the Theresienwiese in Heilbronn in northern Baden-Württemberg . The tower was built in 1940 and after the former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Walther Wever , General-Wever-tower named. It survived the numerous air raids on Heilbronn with almost no damage, but has only been accessible via ladders or scaffolding since the access ramp was blown up in 1951. The tower has been a listed building since the 1990s . It received its current name in 2016.
history
After private housing was banned at the beginning of the war in September 1939 , the focus of construction activity was on creating private and public shelters. Since Heilbronn was not classified as particularly hazardous to the air and also had numerous cellars that met the requirements of air protection , only a few bunker structures were arranged and approved in the city. In addition to the shelter at Industrieplatz and the rescue station under Kaiser-Friedrich-Platz, the bunker on Theresienwiese commissioned by the Reich Aviation Ministry from mid-1940 was one of only three new bunkers in Heilbronn.
The tower was built by Dyckerhoff & Widmann from Düsseldorf . The Düsseldorfer Dietelgesellschaft was also involved in the construction and was to hand the tower over to Luftgaukommando VII in Munich (which was responsible for Heilbronn from May 1940 to September 1944) on August 15, 1940 . The namesake was the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Walther Wever, who died in an accident in 1936. The tower was planned for military purposes, but according to current knowledge, no weapons were installed in it. Rather, shortly after the tower was completed in October 1940, the city of Heilbronn received approval to use the tower as a shelter for the neighboring city slaughterhouse in return for maintenance of the built-in diesel generator. Until the end of the war, the tower always had a military crew, partly anti-aircraft units, partly SS units.
In addition to the slaughterhouse workers, residents of the surrounding streets and travelers from the nearby Heilbronn main train station also sought protection in the General Wever Tower when there was an air hazard. After the first major air raid on Heilbronn on September 10, 1944, people in search of protection stayed in the tower permanently. There was no cooking place, so that one was always dependent on the supply from outside. When, during the great air raid on December 4, 1944, numerous people in the tower sought protection from the inferno of flames in the city center, the rooms reserved as crew rooms and for camp purposes were also opened to civilians.
After December 4, 1944, the tower served as an alternative school room for the Rosenau School and as the seat of the NSDAP local branch in the station suburb. A total of around 1000 people found space in the tower. If the tower was fully occupied in the event of an air hazard, it was closed. Among the rejected asylum seekers, there were several deaths , especially in the low-flying attacks of the last weeks of the war.
After the end of the war, the tower was briefly used as an emergency shelter for bombed-out people, and later as a bunker hotel in Heilbronn as an overnight accommodation for poor people in transit. In 1947 around 1000 people stayed there every month. In 1948 the use of the tower was given up. Since the access ramp was blown up in 1951, the tower has only been accessible via ladders or scaffolding. From 1963 to the end of the 1980s it carried a large-area neon advertisement for the MAN company , which is where the occasional name MAN tower comes from.
The tower was registered as a civil defense facility together with the two other bunkers from the 1940s until 1999. In the 1990s, the tower came from federal property into the possession of the city of Heilbronn. It is now a listed building . In order to distance itself from its namesake, the Heilbronn city council decided on February 2, 2016 to rename the tower based on the neighboring Theresienwiese in Theresienturm.
In order to strengthen the culture of remembrance in Heilbronn, the intention was to reopen the Theresienturm for interested visitors. A new entrance building was created through a donation campaign by the Heilbronn Community Foundation, so the tower has been accessible again since April 2019.
description
The tower is 28.50 meters high and tapers from bottom to top with a diameter of 12 to 11 meters. The exterior walls, clad with natural stone, are approx. 1.40 meters thick, the butt-cylindrical roof is 2.00 meters thick. Inside there are ten floors, each about 2.00 meters high. The original access to the tower was a drivable ramp from the flood dam at the slaughterhouse to the third floor of the tower. From there, the external staircase that still exists today leads to another entrance on the fourth floor of the tower. The high access had various reasons, including the flood protection in the flood area of the Neckar .
The bottom floor contained a diesel generator, diesel tanks, well, pumping system, air filter, etc., the second tower floor remained empty and was probably planned as a storage room, the third (access) floor had windows to the outside and was probably planned as a gun position, too if guns were never installed there. The six floors above have round crew quarters for 42 people each. Each of these floors has two toilets, and there is a wash trough in each of the crew quarters. The six crew floors are connected by a spiral corridor along the outer wall. This corridor served as an additional lounge. The avoidance of stairs on these floors was intended to ensure that the tower could be occupied quickly and smoothly in the event of an emergency and was used in numerous bunkers of this type or similar. The top floor finally provides access to the roof platform. The platform was primarily designed to accommodate an anti-aircraft gun, but whether such a gun was installed is disputed.
The design of the tower corresponds to the Dietel design , a further development of the Zombeck design patented in 1937 . In terms of its design, the Theresienturm is identical to the earlier Manfred Richthofen Tower in Darmstadt, known today as the Mozart Tower, and a tower named after Oswald Boelcke on the Opel factory site in Rüsselsheim, which was blown up in 1959 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Nazi tower will probably be renamed. In: Stimme.de. Heilbronn Voice, accessed on February 2, 2016 .
- ↑ General-Wever-Turm is now called Theresienturm. In: Stimme.de. Heilbronn Voice, accessed on February 2, 2016 .
- ↑ Access building at Theresienturm inaugurated - part of a lived culture of remembrance. Heilbronn Community Foundation, April 15, 2019, accessed on May 10, 2019 .
literature
- Walter Hirschmann, Susanne Schlösser: A monument is discovered. The opening of the General Wever Tower on Theresienwiese on the Open Monument Day 2000 , in: Heilbronnica 2. Contributions to City History , Heilbronn 2003, pp. 361–374.
Web links
- Theresienturm (formerly General Wever Tower) at the Heilbronn City Archives
- theresienturm.de The access to the Theresienturm, information page of the Heilbronn community foundation.
Coordinates: 49 ° 8 '22.8 " N , 9 ° 12' 12.7" E