Grunertstrasse tunnel

Grunertstraße tunnel, on the left the memorial plaque defaced by vandalism

The tunnel Grunert Street is located in the Essen district Frohnhausen . It is a passage under the main railway line and served as a camp for prisoners of war during World War II .

history

It is named after the neighboring Grunertstraße to the north, which was named on May 16, 1902 after the mathematician Johann August Grunert .

The tunnel under the Dortmund-Duisburg railway line , in the course of Grunertstrasse at the former open-air swimming pool West (opened in 1968, closed in 2000), is today marked with a plaque at the south entrance that reads:

"During the Second World War, this tunnel was the accommodation for 170 prisoners of war."

The prisoner of war camp north of the tunnel on the neighboring Nöggerathstrasse in Altendorfer area, occupied by 644 French prisoners of war, was destroyed on April 27, 1944 in an Allied air raid . Of the 315 surviving prisoners of war, 170 were quartered in the tunnel, the remainder being distributed to Krupp factories as forced laborers . Nowadays, visitors can get an idea of ​​the conditions in the tunnel at that time through an inspection: darkness, cold and humidity. The conditions after the destruction of the camp were catastrophic: instead of living in barracks as before, people now lived in dog houses, urinals and old ovens. Five people had to sleep in a dog house one meter high and about three meters long. There was no water, blankets, tables or chairs anywhere. Medical care took place in the open air.

South of the tunnel, on what is now the Helmut Rahn sports facility on Raumerstrasse, there was also a prisoner of war camp for up to 1,500 Soviet prisoners of war . She too had to work as a forced laborer in Krupp factories and on the Overrathshof directly south of the tunnel. To separate the French prisoners of war south of the tunnel from the Soviet prisoners of war in the north, there was at times a wall in the tunnel.

At the end of 2009, there were plans to renovate the tunnel, which were presented to the citizens of neighboring districts in November of that year. They have not been realized.

"Aqualand" (2019)

In 2016 it was approved that the dilapidated tunnel, now known as the “Devil's Bridge”, could be painted by the graffiti artist Pascal Maßbaum. The work of art “Aqualand” was created within two months, consisting of various sea creatures over a length of 56 m with a radius of 3 m. The entrances and exits were designed by further art projects and lighting was installed.

Web links

Commons : Tunnel Grunertstraße  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Description of this sight on the route of industrial culturehttp: //vorlage.rik.test/~5~10524
• Forced labor in Essen, booklet for the history competition for schoolchildren, 2001, edited by Klaus Wisotzky ( memento of December 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive ); accessed on January 15, 2014 (PDF file; 846 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Erwin Dickhoff: Essener streets . Ed .: City of Essen - Historical Association for City and Monastery of Essen. Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8375-1231-1 .
2. ^ The Nuremberg Trial, Minutes of the Eighteenth Day, December 12, 1945. Zeno.org, accessed March 4, 2016 . 
3. ^ Frohnhauser history work group
4. ↑ Stadtspiegel Essen, Westanzeiger from November 18, 2009
5. ↑ Light not only at the end of the tunnel. NRZ, October 21, 2016, accessed June 4, 2020 . 
6. ↑ "FEAR room finally gone!" Stadtspiegel Essen, October 30, 2016, accessed on June 4, 2020 . 

Coordinates: 51 ° 27 ′ 15.5 ″  N , 6 ° 57 ′ 36 ″  E