Wool soaps
Wollseifen was a village on the Dreiborn plateau , not far from the former Nazi Ordensburg Vogelsang , in what is now the Eifel National Park .
After the end of the Second World War , the village was evacuated by British forces in order to create the Vogelsang military training area on the surrounding area . This was handed over to the Belgian military in 1950. Since January 1st, 2006, after the military training area was closed , the place, now a desert , has been open to the public again.
history
While the surrounding Urfttal archaeological finds, according to already Roman was settled, the village Wollseifen at the height (about 500 m) is first mentioned in the 12th century documented as Wolf - Siefen , which means as much as a river valley in which the in the Middle Ages Eifel occurring wolves drank; only the valleys of Urft and Neffgesbach below the plateau could have been meant . The first settlers lived in simple huts made of tree trunks placed against each other with a fireplace ( Waasemshötten ).
The forerunner of the parish church of St. Rochus was, apart from the later village, a chapel consecrated to Saint Walburga in 799 at a Carolingian royal court ( Walberhof ). 1145 was the Walberhof by the Roman-German King Konrad III. given to the Steinfeld monastery . This donation was confirmed by Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa in 1162. Connected to the village of Wollseifen as a fief in the Holy Roman Empire , the Walberhof became the property of the German Labor Front in 1933/34 and was later demolished; Today, the hikers' car park is located on the premises on Bundesstrasse 266 at the “Vogelsang” roundabout.
In the village itself, the construction of a chapel began in the 15th century, which took over the services in 1470 and was elevated to a parish church in 1635. The Walburgis Chapel fell into disrepair, and today there is nothing left of it. Wollseifen belonged to the county of Schleiden in the Duchy of Luxembourg . In addition to Wollseifen, the localities of Dreiborn (part of the village), Einruhr , Leykaul, Morsbach (part of the village), Krummenauel and Walberhof belonged to the judicial district of Wollseifen .
After 1792 French revolutionary troops occupied the Austrian Netherlands , to which the Duchy of Luxembourg belonged, and annexed it in October 1795 . From 1795 to 1814 the place belonged to the department of the Ourthe .
The population lived from modest agriculture, sheep breeding, logging and charcoal making until the 19th century. Between 1899 and 1904, the construction of the Urft barrier also created jobs. Before the First World War, tourism was accompanied by a first economic boom. During the Weimar Republic , Wollseifen was the first place on the Dreiborner Höhe to have an electrical power line and its own water pipe. At that time, Wollseifen had a rich club life ( youth club with an unknown date of foundation, music club from 1905, choir club from 1914).
During the National Socialist era, the residents promised themselves additional jobs from the construction of the Ordensburg Vogelsang , a training center for the NSDAP's “young leaders”. It is inexplicable to the editors of the publication Wollseifen - Das tote Dorf (p. 32) why “even prudent men were enthusiastic about this activity” . In 1940 the construction of the village Vogelsang began near Wollseifen , a "residential complex" for civilian workers on the Ordensburg. In the battle for the Eifel in the late phase of the Second World War (September 1944 to January 1945), wool soaps were damaged by Allied artillery fire.
The evacuated population returned to Wollseifen, which was under British administration, in the summer of 1945.
The evacuation on September 1, 1946 and subsequent destruction
On August 13, 1946, the British military administration requested the approximately 120 families of the village of Wollseifen (approx. 500 residents, part of the municipality of Dreiborn ) to evacuate the village within three weeks, because the British wanted to use the area for a military training area.
The request caused consternation among the unprepared population, who had believed that after returning from the war and exile, through the makeshift reconstruction of their houses and first cultivation of their fields, they would be out of the woods. As a result, people not only lost their homes, but also their jobs, as they made a living from agriculture.
On September 1, 1946, wool soaps were declared a restricted area by the British. The residents were able to bring in the grain harvest beforehand; For the potato harvest, they were given a separate permit on a weekend in October.
The people from Wollseifen were initially taken to emergency shelters in the surrounding villages ( Einruhr , Herhahn , Gemünd , Schleiden, etc.) or were accommodated with relatives and friends nearby. They left the keys in the front doors as they expected to return soon and wanted to avoid damage to the farms. At first, they returned to their homes more often, despite the British lockdown. However, the British use the houses on the military training area as targets for target practice. As a result of the target practice and fires, the abandoned farms were gradually destroyed and later, with the exception of the undestroyed transformer house and the ruins of the church, the former school building and a chapel on the edge of the village, were removed. This destroyed the hopes of the Wollseifen of a return to their village, which had survived the war.
The church burned down in 1947, which caused the entire interior to be lost.
Three years later, in 1950, the people of Wollseifen received only partial refugee status from the Schleiden district administration within the meaning of the Refugee Settlement Act of 10 August 1949. Also in 1950, the British handed the training area over to the Belgian armed forces. Once a year on All Souls' Day , the people of Wollseifen were allowed to visit the graves of their relatives with the permission of the Belgian military administration .
In 1954, Wollseifen was fired at with artillery twice a week from the Belgian military training area in Elsenborn , about 23 km away , with the church and cemetery being so badly damaged that the graves could no longer be tended and the dead were taken to the cemeteries in 1955 surrounding new homes of the former residents were reburied.
When it became clear after 1955 that the military training area would be permanent and that the Wollseifen residents would not be able to return to their homeland, the Federal Property Administration began to buy up the real estate. The price was disputed; many owners felt disadvantaged. In 1962 the now scattered villagers founded the traditional Wollseifen association , which represented their interests in reparations payments to the federal government. After these demands were rejected by the Petitions Committee of the German Bundestag in 1975 , the association shifted its activities to historiography, dialect poetry and the preservation of traditions (senior citizens' meeting, honor of the dead, patron saint of St. Roch on August 17th). The number of members of the association is declining due to the passage of time. The descendants of the evacuated Wollseifener arranged their lives differently.
church
New buildings
On the site of the former village, the Belgian military built numerous backdrop houses to be able to practice house-to-house fighting . For example, training was carried out here in May 2001 for the Kosovo mission.
A heated debate arose around these houses as to whether they should all be listed as historical monuments. From the point of view of the National Park Forestry Office, there were reasons of road safety (every existing building must be kept safe for traffic), the associated costs, the prohibition of any human intervention in the national park, as well as the use of the houses as uncleaned toilets and rubbish dumps for demolition. In 2012, the Monument Protection Office and the National Park Forestry Office agreed on a compromise: 21 of the original 52 houses remained. In the spring, these were secured in particular by bricking up the doors and windows on the ground floor so that access for visitors to the national park is no longer possible. Slits were left for reptiles and bats and embankments were made in the cellars to allow them to leave. A side effect of this measure is that the view of the former parish church is more free.
Renovations in the 21st century
The training area was given up on January 1, 2006 by the Belgian army. On March 16, 2006, the Förderverein Wollseifen eV was founded as a contemporary alternative to the traditional Wollseifen association , which carried out restoration measures and converted the site into a place of reflection and memorial. On August 20, 2006, the first service in 60 years took place in the church ruins; Since then, there has been one every year on the Sunday following the name day of Saint Roch (August 16) (patronage festival).
The chapel on the outskirts was renovated in 2007 by volunteers and blessed again. Next to her, the stone trough of the Wollseifener Fountain, which was previously kept in Herhahn, was brought back close to its original location.
The nave received a new roof structure in 2008; this and the church tower were covered with slate . Further restoration work on the church was completed in 2009/10; the masonry was drained, windows and doors were installed and a resurrection cross and three small pews were placed inside.
The ruin of the school (ground floor) was secured. Since March 2011, new street signs in the Eifel dialect have been naming the former village streets. Historical photographs that were posted in the church, at the school and on the information board in the center of the village document village life in the pre-war period.
In November 2014, the restoration of the wool soaps elementary school began, which currently houses a small exhibition on wool soaps.
The church and chapel in the former Wollseifen have repeatedly been victims of vandalism after their renovation . Church windows, although made of wired glass, were destroyed, a statue placed in the church was stolen and replacement statues were repeatedly stolen; the statue of the Virgin Mary in the renovated chapel was the target of shooting exercises.
National park
Since the military training area was closed, the area, including the standing buildings of Wollseifen, has belonged to the Eifel National Park Forestry Office (Landesbetrieb Wald und Holz NRW).
Wollseifen is accessible again on hiking routes set up by the national park administration. It lies at the intersection of four marked hiking trails, namely
- from the east (Infocenter Vogelsang) through the forest along the Neffgesbach valley - approx. 3 km,
- from the west (Einruhr) - approx. 5 km,
- from the south (Herhahn) over the Dreiborn plateau - approx. 4 km - as well
- from the north, starting from the Urft Barrier Wall - also just under 4 km.
The latter route is particularly popular with hikers when the gorse is in bloom on the Dreiborn plateau, with its wide views of Vogelsang Castle, Urftsee and Kermeter . Routes 2 and 4 can also be combined as a circular hike thanks to the paths along the banks of the Obersee and the boat trips on both arms of this lake. The closest car park (with bus stop and connections to Einruhr or Gemünd) is the Walberhof car park on the B266 (1.5 km)
The former village of Wollseifen in the Eifel National Park is now a place of silence and reflection.
literature
- Hermann Hinsen: The wool soap office (Land Überruhr). An enclave of Schleiden County in the Duchy of Jülich. In: Yearbook of the district of Euskirchen 2003, pp. 24–34.
- Werner Rosen: Wollseifen: The sacrifice of a village. 40 years after the eviction - a bishop remembers. In: Yearbook of the district of Euskirchen 1986, pp. 122-134.
- Raimund Schumacher: From the history of wool soap and the Walberhof. In: Home calendar of the Schleiden district 1960, pp. 135–138.
- Traditionsverein Wollseifen (ed.): Wollseifen - The Dead Village . Schleiden. (Self-published)
- Andreas Züll: Fallen, missing and civilian victims from the village and parish of Wollseifen in both world wars (including soldiers and evacuees who died in Wollseifen). In: Karl Oehms (ed.): Yearbook 2014 of the Westdeutsche Gesellschaft für Familienkunde eV (= publications of the WGfF, vol. 291), Cologne-Trier 2014, pp. 287-310.
- Andreas Züll: "To the glory of God and the pious people of Wolseiffen". For the 380th anniversary of the Rochus Church in Wollseifen 1635–2015. In: Yearbook of the District of Euskirchen 2015, pp. 53–63.
Web links
- taz article: Die Heimatbauer
- top map from 1894 (wool soaps)
- Wool soaps the dead village - facts, history, information and pictures about wool soaps
- Dominik Reinle: The history of wool soaps wdr.de August 17, 2008
- Official website of the National Park Administration
- Wool soaps on Ferrari's card around 1770, see no.248
Individual evidence
- ^ Wilhelm Fabricius : Explanations of the Historical Atlas of the Rhine Province, Die Karte von 1789 (2nd volume), Bonn 1898. P. 34
- ↑ http://dreiborn.eu/dorfchronik.html
- ↑ Andreas Fasel: The last fight for wool soaps . June 26, 2004 ( welt.de [accessed June 18, 2019]).
- ^ Aachener Nachrichten, Nordeifel, page 15, number 31 of February 6, 2013
- ↑ http://www.nationalpark-eifel.de/data/aktuelles/PM_Wollseifen_1158059200.pdf Press release from the Eifel National Park Forestry Office
Coordinates: 50 ° 34 ′ 46.3 " N , 6 ° 25 ′ 37.2" E