Wolfsschanze headquarters

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Ruin of Hitler's bunker in Wolfsschanze

Wolfsschanze (also Wolfschanze ) was the cover name for a military situation center of the command staff of the German Wehrmacht . It was one of the Führer headquarters during the Second World War and was located near Rastenburg (today Kętrzyn ) near the village of Görlitz ( Gierłoż ) in East Prussia , today in Poland .

Bunker system in East Prussia

The Wolfsschanze was part of a bunker system and quarters that housed command posts for the staffs of most of the German military branches. In the OKH Mauerwald (Mamerki), 20 km away , the headquarters of the High Command of the Army (OKH) and the headquarters of the Army Main Supply Service had their headquarters from 1941 to January 1945. In the vicinity of Possessern (Pozezdrze), the bunkered Hochwald field command post for Heinrich Himmler , in width Heide (Szeroki BOR) the Goering -Quartier, in Goldap the quarters, and the Laboratory of the Air Force (alias Robinson ), in rose garden (Radzieje), the lodging of the Reichskanzlei bosses , in Nikolaiken the defense headquarters, in Lötzen (Giżycko) in the Boyen the Defense department Fremde Heere Ost , which, under the direction of Reinhard Gehlen, obtained information from the Soviet prisoners. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop also had residences in the Lehndorff family's castle in Steinort (Sztynort) and on the Schwenzaitsee (Jezioro Święcajty). Göring owned a property in Rominter Heide , the Reichsjägerhof Rominten . The Wolfsschanze hospital was located in the former Carlshöfer institute .

Surname

The code name was Adolf Hitler of the plant itself, similar to the one used by his pseudonym " Wolf " that the importance of his first name Adolf was due and he had mainly used in his private correspondence of the 1920s. Another code name of the Führer Headquarters East was "Görlitz".

history

Interior view of the Hitler bunker

The Wolfsschanze was built above ground by the Todt Organization from 1940 . To protect against aerial reconnaissance, it was in a dense forest under non-combustible camouflage nets and was covered with a camouflaging mortar. Numerous flak positions secured against air attacks. A total of around 100 different objects and buildings were erected in the area between 1940 and 1944. The construction site had the cover name "Chemical Works Askania". Since 1941, with the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union ( Operation Barbarossa ), the Wolfsschanze was Hitler's main residence.

The facility comprised a total of around 40 residential, commercial and administrative buildings as well as seven massive and 40 light reinforced concrete bunkers. The ceilings of the bunkers were six to eight meters thick. The facility had a rail connection and had its own airfield. It was surrounded by a 50 to 150 meter wide mine belt and a 10 km long barbed wire fence. There was constant radio and telephone connection to Berlin and to all sections of the front.

Hitler was in bunker no.13 of the spartan layout, in the strictly secured restricted area 1 . In addition to the commanders of the Wehrmacht, high-ranking representatives of the NSDAP also stayed there. There were a total of three restricted areas, each of which required a pass. The wooden barracks of the “ Führer-Accompanying Battalion ” were located in restricted area 2 . A total of over 2,100 officers , soldiers and civilians stayed at the Fuehrer's headquarters permanently.

However, the security was not strict enough to prevent the bomb attack on Hitler on July 20, 1944 , which Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg carried out on the Wolfsschanze site during a briefing. The officer on watch for the inner restricted area was therefore not authorized to carry out searches. The gates were made of wood, the fences of wire mesh. If generals passed, their escort was also not further controlled. As a rule, members of the SS division “ Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler ” were responsible for monitoring the Führer-Escort Battalion ; In the course of the war, war invalids of this unit were increasingly used. Since July 20, 1992, a memorial plaque in the form of an open book with a broken spine has been commemorating the attack.

Ruins of the building that housed the stenographer's service.
Memorial plaque for the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944
Guest bunker

On November 20, 1944, Hitler left Wolfsschanze for good when the Red Army was less than a hundred kilometers away. The bunker was then taken over by the staff of the 4th Army from General Friedrich Hoßbach .

When the Red Army advanced on January 24, 1945, all objects were blown up by the retreating Wehrmacht. It is believed that up to 8 tons of explosives were used to detonate individual bunkers. From 1945 to 1955 around 54,000 mines were defused here.

The remains have been a tourist attraction in Masuria since 1959 , which around 200,000 people visit annually. With modernization measures in the amount of 1.6 million euros by a private investor in 2012, the number of visitors should be increased to 240,000.

There should be a lack of a serious presentation of the bunker area. The fact that the 57 ha area of Wolfschanze is classified as an important biotope according to the Council of Europe Directive (92/43 / EEC) is only briefly informed.

Site plan of the facility

The numbering on this plan does not correspond to the numbering of the system as the visitor finds it on site today.

Site plan of Wolfsschanze:
1. Office and residential building of Hitler's bodyguard
2. Building of the bodyguard and security service
3. Emergency power generator
4. Bunker
5. Building of the Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich
6. Advisory barracks, location of the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944
7. Security service
8. Air raid shelter for guests
9. Bodyguard
10. Building of the stenographic service
11. Security service, first bodyguard of Hitler's Rattenhuber , head of the Högl police department, post office building
12. Telegraph service
13. Garages
14. Driving service
15. Cinema
16. Heating building
17. Theo Morell , Bodenschatz , Hewel , Voss , Wolff , Fegelein
18. Storage warehouse
19. Building of Martin Bormann , Hitler's personal secretary
20. Bormann's air raid shelter and his personal environment
21. Adjutantur of Hitler and the Wehrmacht, Personnel Office of the Wehrmacht
22. Casino II
23rd General Alfred Jodl , Chief of the Wehrmacht Command Staff in the Wehrmacht High Command
24. Fire-extinguishing
pond 25. Office building of the external m inisteriums
26. Fritz Todt , after his fatal accident: Albert Speer
27. Hotel of the bodyguard
28. Publicly accessible air raid shelter with flak and machine gun units on the roof
29. Casino I
30. New tea room
31. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel , Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht
32. Old tea room
33. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring's building ,
34. Göring's air raid shelter with flak, machine gun and reflector units
35. Representation of the Air Force High Command
36. Representation of the High Command of the Navy
37. Hitler's bunker with flak station
38. Railway line Rastenburg ( Kętrzyn ) - Angerburg ( Węgorzewo )

Propagandistic staging of the facility

The “Führer Headquarters” were not just facilities for military purposes, but were at the center of Nazi propaganda from the start, which made the word “Führer Headquarters” an exclusive trademark of Hitler as commander in chief of the Wehrmacht. In order to give the headquarters the aura of mythical places of historical importance, Hitler kept them at a spatial distance, especially from the Army High Command .

In this context, the historian Christoph Raichle put forward the thesis that the enormous expansion of the Wolfschanze in East Prussia in autumn 1944 served less military purposes, but was conceived by Hitler, who had already had the war defeat in mind, as a "bulwark of doom" been. In this way, Hitler wanted to leave a document of his struggle against communism for posterity through the ruins, which even withstood large-scale attempts at demolition .

See also

literature

  • Christel Focken: FHQ “Führer Headquarters” Wolfsschanze (Masuria). Helios-Verlag, Aachen 2008, ISBN 978-3-938208-84-7 .
  • Walter Frentz: Wolfsschanze. Lempertz, Königswinter 2011, ISBN 978-3-939284-06-2 .
  • Martin Kaule: Wolfsschanze. "Fuehrer's Headquarters" in Masuria. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86153-768-7 .
  • Uwe Neumärker , Robert Conrad, Cord Woywodt: "Wolfsschanze". Hitler's power center in World War II. 4th edition. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-86153-433-4 .
  • Christoph Raichle: Hitler as a symbol politician. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 2014. (Chapter 6 Wolfsschanze , pp. 425–435)
  • Alfons Schulz: Three years in the news center of the Fuehrer's headquarters. 2nd Edition. Christiana, Stein am Rhein 1997, ISBN 3-7171-1028-4 .
  • Jerzy Szynkowski: Wolfsschanze; General information, the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, sound visual material, memories of contemporary witnesses. ALGRAF sc Bischofsburg / Biskupiec.
  • Jan Zduniak, Agnieszka Zduniak: Wolfsschanze and Hitler's other war headquarters in words and pictures. Kengraf, Kętrzyn 2006, ISBN 83-89119-18-8 .

Web links

Commons : Wolfsschanze  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. 30 undestroyed bunkers - Mauerwald - Headquarters of the Army High Command. ( Memento from March 31, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  2. Boris Böhm, Hagen Markwardt, Ulrich Rottleb: "Will be transferred to a state sanatorium and nursing home in Saxony today" - the murder of East Prussian patients in the National Socialist killing center in Pirna-Sonnenstein in 1941 . Ed .: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. 2015, ISBN 978-3-86583-976-3 , pp. 41 ff .
  3. In the Führer Headquarters (FHQ)
  4. J. Zduniak, A. Zduniak: Wolfsschanze and Hitler's other war headquarters in words and pictures. Wydawnictwo KENGRAF, Kętrzyn 2011, p. 14 f.
  5. Wolfsschanze near Rastenburg
  6. Karin Tomala: Commemoration in Wolfsschanze: A voice from Poland: a place of encounter. In: ZEIT ONLINE . July 31, 1992, accessed February 16, 2020 .
  7. Destruction of Wolfsschanze. ( Memento from April 16, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  8. Masurian travel portal
  9. Thomas Klatt: The horror as business. In: General-Anzeiger Bonn. Garnish. 17./18. October 2015, p. 2.
  10. Christoph Raichle: Hitler as a symbol politician . Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 2014, p. 221 ff .
  11. Christoph Raichle: Hitler as a symbol politician . Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 2014, p. 431-35 .

Coordinates: 54 ° 4 ′ 46 ″  N , 21 ° 29 ′ 37 ″  E