Castle of the Dead (monument)

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Memorial to the memory of the Silesian uprisings (1919–1921) in St. Annaberg. The castle of the dead there was demolished by Poland after the Second World War
German war cemetery near El Alamein

Necropolis were a certain type of war memorials that were planned especially during the time of National Socialism . They were to be built after the National Socialist " final victory ".

After the First World War (1914-1918), the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (VDK) was founded in 1919 , whose self-declared task also included honoring fallen soldiers with war memorials (often synonymous with “memorials”). Under the direction of the architect Robert Tischler , this organization first planned the construction of a large memorial in Bitola in what was then Yugoslavia in 1929/30 . The building, which was erected from 1935 to 1937, consisted of a cubic hall of honor with a narrow portal, which was provided with a bronze gate. In the center of the inner courtyard, which was surrounded by a 2.50 meter high quarry stone wall, 3,000 soldiers who died in the world war were buried. This building was first referred to as the "Castle of the Dead" in 1936. Other monuments of this type with a monumental character were then built in Petrisoru ( Romania ), St. Annaberg (Silesia) and Tannenberg ( East Prussia ).

In 1941, Adolf Hitler appointed the well-known and renowned architect Wilhelm Kreis (1873–1955) "General Building Councilor for the Design of German War Cemeteries". Even before the First World War, Kreis had designed and built large memorials, for example the fraternity monument near Eisenach (1900–1902) and many Bismarck towers . The monuments at Annaberg and Bitola had found his approval; he planned the memorials in the same style. The monuments were to be erected in all countries in which the German Wehrmacht fought during the Second World War (1939–1945). Numerous plans for structures near Warsaw , Narvik , Mount Olympus ( Greece ) and North Africa were made . The largest and best-known design concerned the erection of a war memorial on the Dnieper ( Ukraine ), which should reach a diameter of 280 meters and a height of 130 meters and carry Etruscan trains.

In terms of style, Kreis often used some of his older designs from the period before 1914, in which he incorporated architectural borrowings from all possible epochs that he considered suitable. Only the overall impression counted. As a certain continuity, it can be stated that the example of the Staufer castle Castel del Monte was used particularly often . For the monument in North Africa, he tended to resort to the motif of an Egyptian temple.

In a work show in 1953, Kreis also exhibited his designs for the buildings on the Dnepr and North Africa. At this time, the term "burial castles" became common, which the district itself and in the specialist magazines had always called "cenotaphs", "war memorials" or "death marks". In 1955, the VDK had the German war cemetery built near El Alamein to commemorate those who fell in the African campaign , with the clear features of Castel del Monte.

The architectural historian Winfried Nerdinger (* 1944) once called the "castles of the dead" the "most gruesome planning in 20th century architecture."

literature

  • Gunnar Brands :
    • Confessions of a conformist - the architect Wilhelm Kreis as general building officer for the design of the German war cemeteries , in: Ulrich Kuder (Ed.): Architecture and Engineering at the Time of the National Socialist Tyranny 1933-1945 , Berlin 1997, pp. 124–156. ISBN 0-88402-260-9 ( Here you can also find numerous graphic sketches for the Kreis' designs. )
    • From World War I cemeteries to the Nazi "Fortresses of the dead" - Architecture, heroic landscape, and the quest for national identity in Germany , in: Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Hrsg.): Places of commemoration. Search for identity and landscape design (= Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture , Vol. 19). Washington / DC 1995, pp. 215-56. ISBN 3-7861-1915-5 ( Here you can also find numerous graphic sketches for the circle designs. )
  • Christian Fuhrmeister: The “immortal landscape”, the realm of the empire and the dead of the nation - the burial castles Bitoli (1936) and Quero (1939) as strategic memorial architecture, in: Kritische reports, issue 2/2001, pp. 56–70.
  • Christian Zentner (ed.): The great lexicon of the Third Reich. Page 583, Castle of the Dead; Weltbild, Augsburg 1993; ISBN 3893505636 .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quotation from: Gunnar Brands: Confessions of an Adapted - The Architect Wilhelm Kreis as General Building Councilor for the design of the German war cemeteries , p. 124