Weihetalbrücke
The Weihe Viaduct (also isolated: Viaduct Richelsdorf ) is a 584 m long and a maximum of 37 m high motorway bridge as part of the Federal Highway 4 in the field of community Gerstungen in Wartburgkreis in Thuringia close to the Hessian border .
Geographical location
The Weihetalbrücke leads directly southeast of the Richelsdorf Mountains and a little east-southeast of the Hessian Richelsdorf and northwest of the Thuringian Untersuhl over the Weihe valley . It is located in the area of the Gerstungen motorway junction , whose entrance / exit towards Frankfurt is east and towards Dresden west of the bridge.
history
The Reichsautobahn section from the Kirchheimer Dreieck near Bad Hersfeld to Eisenach , built between 1934 and 1943, was the last halfway completed autobahn in the Third Reich . However, in the situation of the Reichsautobahn construction after the beginning of the war, the Weihetalbrücke and the Wommen viaduct could not be completed by the end of the war; The construction of the Werra valley bridge in Hörschel was no longer started. While the southern half of the bridge at the Wommen viaduct was largely completed, the construction of the Weihetalbrücke did not go beyond the seven pillars for a vault bridge until the war-related cessation of construction work. Instead, a provisional, bird's-eye view of the Z-shaped route in the valley was created for the motorway, which was originally intended as the carriageway for the Gerstungen junction and largely corresponds to its current route. By the time construction was stopped in 1943, the formwork for the six bridge vaults had already been installed; they disappeared in the first post-war years.
During the construction of the Weihetalbrücke 550 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union did forced labor until the construction work was stopped . Since 1977, a memorial in the Untersuhl cemetery has been commemorating 107 victims of forced labor . The entire section of the A4 between Wildeck-Obersuhl and Eisenach crossed the former inner-German and today's Hessian-Thuringian border several times. For this reason, the motorway route between the Hessian junctions Obersuhl and Wommen remained closed and slowly fell into disrepair. Because of the peculiarity of the borderline, this section of the A4 was known as the Thuringian tip . The seven pillars of the Weihetalbrücke remained in ruins during this period .
After German reunification , a new bridge was built in 1992 as part of the German Unity No. 15 traffic project, whereby two of the old pillars were left as memorials. The remaining five pillars of the unfinished bridge were blown up on July 18, 1992.
description
Today's Weihetalbrücke, which costs 45 million DM, was inaugurated in 1994. The prestressed concrete bridge has a total span of (52.0 m + 8 × 60.0 m + 52.0 m) = 584 m and rests on eight pairs of piers. The pillars, which are a maximum of 37 m high, have an octagonal, massive cross-section with external dimensions of 5.8 m × 3.0 m. The superstructures consist of a pre-stressed hollow box cross-section with a construction height of 4.0 m.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Topographic map 1: 25000 5026 Berka / Werra; Thuringian Land Survey Office 1997, ISBN 3-86140-046-4
- ↑ Wolfgang Jäger: A 4 "Thuringian Zipfel" Completion after over 50 years. In: autobahngeschichte.de. April 28, 2016, accessed November 8, 2019 .
- ↑ Thuringian Association of the Persecuted of the Nazi Regime - Association of Antifascists and Study Group of German Resistance 1933–1945 (Ed.): Heimatgeschichtlicher Wegweiser to places of resistance and persecution 1933–1945 , Heimatgeschichtliche Wegweiser, Volume 8 Thuringia, Erfurt 2003, ISBN 3-88864 -343-0 , p. 323.
Coordinates: 50 ° 57 ′ 36 ″ N , 10 ° 2 ′ 41 ″ E