Willy Stöhr

This article covers the civil engineer; on the politician see Willi Stöhr .

Willy Stöhr (born March 23, 1905 in Ulm ; † May 24, 1997 ) was a German civil engineer . In Germany he was one of the pioneers in the use of prestressed concrete in bridge construction and in the early 1950s in Heilbronn demonstrated its possible uses in large bridge construction.

Rosenberg Bridge Heilbronn

Pre-war period

Stöhr was the son of a master stonemason at Ulm Minster and after graduating from high school in 1923 (at the Oberrealschule Ulm) studied civil engineering at the Technical University of Stuttgart . He graduated in 1927 as the best in his class. Emil Mörsch , Hermann Maier-Leibnitz and Leopold Rothmund were among his teachers . Mörsch placed him with the construction company Wayss & Freytag in Berlin - Mörsch had previously been technical director at Wayss & Freytag and was still closely associated with the company as a consultant. In 1929, due to the poor economic situation, Stöhr switched to civil service at the Reutlingen Road and Water Works Authority. In 1931 he was appointed government master builder ( assessor in the public building administration). He was the site manager at the Rockenau and Neckarzimmern barrages . From 1934 he worked for the construction management of the Reichsautobahn in Stuttgart under Karl Schaechterle and Emil Klett . There he met Fritz Leonhardt , with whom he remained friends. His projects included the Neckar Bridge in Unterboihingen (a three- hinged arched disc bridge ), the Leipheim Danube Bridge and the Rohrbach Bridge near Eltingen , all reinforced concrete arch bridges. He won the competition for the Rohrbach Bridge against Fritz Leonhardt, and Paul Bonatz was involved as an architectural consultant . In 1937 he moved to the civil engineering department of the city of Heilbronn (responsible for bridges and waters). There he designed the Rosenberg Bridge , completed in 1939 , which was destroyed in the war and rebuilt in 1950 according to Stöhr's plans. With the help of Mörsch, he was able to overcome material bottlenecks due to the start of the war, but no further bridges were planned. In 1938 he joined the NSDAP (backdated) and was a member of the SA from 1934 to 1939 .

Second World War

In 1939 he went to Posen for the Todt Organization , where he was supposed to rebuild the destroyed Warta bridges. He planned a prestressed concrete bridge, which was no longer implemented. The tendons were used in Poland for another bridge in Lomza. In 1942 he became a senior government building officer in the Reich Road Administration in Berlin under Karl Schaechterle. In 1943 he was drafted into a pioneer unit , but soon afterwards Fritz Leonhardt assigned him to the construction of oil shale refineries in Estonia (Baltölwerke). There he met Wolfhardt Andrä and befriended him. For further training in prestressed concrete, Leonhardt himself traveled to Eugène Freyssinet in France and sent Stöhr to Gustave Magnel in Belgium. After the construction of the Baltölwerke had to be abandoned due to the course of the war and the advance of the Red Army , Stöhr was appointed chief construction manager for the construction of the planned Führer headquarters, Projekt Riese im Eulengebirge - still under the overall direction of Leonhardt, who soon moved to Munich let. In December 1944 Stöhr was transferred to Norway , where he stayed until the surrender in 1945.

post war period

Peter Bruckmann Bridge (2015)

After French captivity , he was back in Öhringen in 1946 and worked as a self-employed engineer. In 1946 he planned the Herdbrücke in Ulm for the Wayss & Freytag / Baresel consortium. It was a concrete bridge for which it has a construction in cantilever envisaged; the head of the civil engineering department in Ulm, Hermann König, insisted on a falsework . In 1947 he was hired again at the Heilbronn Civil Engineering Department, where he was initially classified as a building officer and only regained his old rank as senior building officer in 1960. There he rebuilds the destroyed Neckar bridges, first his own Rosenberg Bridge (1950). With the three-hinged arch bridge at the New Canal Harbor (Peter Bruckmann Bridge) he built the world's first prestressed concrete bridge with a span of more than 100 m. The bridges Obere Badstrasse (Böckinger Brücke, with the participation of Fritz Leonhardt) and Neckargartach followed by 1951 . Except for Neckargartach, they were built by Wayss & Freytag. The Stuttgart construction company Ludwig Bauer won the tender in Neckargartach . There, Leoba tendons ( acronym from the names of the developers Fritz Leo nhardt and Willi Ba ur ) were used for the first time in the construction of large bridges . Of the bridges in Heilbronn, the Peter Bruckmann Bridge and the Rosenberg Bridge still existed in 2018. The Neckargartach bridge had to be demolished in 1998 due to frost and de-icing salt damage, the Böckingen Bridge had problems with vertex subsidence due to inadequate concrete aggregates and was replaced in 2000 by a steel composite bridge. Stöhr is also known to the people of Heilbronn for the design of the banks of the Neckar (1955).

In 1968 he went as head of the Civil Engineering Office Heilbronn in retirement .

In the mid-1990s there was a public discussion about the condition of the bridges in Heilbronn, which was also generally directed against prestressed concrete. That was a problem for Stöhr, even if Fritz Leonhardt publicly jumped at him at the time.

literature

• Eberhard Pelke: Willy Stöhr. An engineering life between dictatorship and democracy. In: Beton- und Stahlbetonbau , 106th year 2011, issue 5, pp. 332–342.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Date of death after entry of Willy Stöhr in the HEUSS database of the Heilbronn City Archives , contemporary history collection, call number ZS-10414
2. ^ Eberhard Pelke : The Client's Influence on the Developments of Methods of Construction in Germany: The Example of Willy Stöhr (1905-1997) (PDF) In: Karl-Eugen Kurrer , Werner Lorenz , Volker Wetzk (Eds.): Proceedings of the Third International Congress on Construction History . Neunplus, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-936033-31-1 , pp. 1155-1162