Showing posts with label Goslar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Goslar. Show all posts

Saxony

Braunschweig (Lower Saxony)
Die deutsche Siedlungsstadt (German Settlement City)

Hitler reviewing the SA in front of the palace in 1931. It was here that Hitler became a German citizen when, on February 25, Hitler’s naturalisation was effected in Brunswick. The official notice read as follows:
Brunswick, February 26 The Führer of the NSDAP, Adolf Hitler, has been appointed Regierungsrat in the Brunswick legation in Berlin with immediate effect. Adolf Hitler has thus become a German citizen. His certificate of appointment was signed in the afternoon of Thursday by the Brunswick
Minister-President Küchenthal and Minister Klagges.
The somewhat dubious means by which Hitler had become a German citizen were not regarded by the National Socialists themselves as improper in the least. Indeed, they were pleased at having “put one over” on the Reich Government and that, by means of this incident, the public had been made aware of a loophole through which citizenship could be procured—and probably had been even before Hitler conceived of the plan.
The statue of Friedrich Wilhelm then and now

The schloss before and after the war

The Andreaskirche and Alten Waage in August 1941 and today

  Hermannsdenkmal and Katharinenkirche, 1941 and now

The Brunswick Lion then and now

 Katharinenkirche at the end of a now-lost Hagenbrücke


Cafe Börner on Adolf-Hitler-Platz and Adolf Hitlerplatz in 1942; not much left of it now...

The RAF exacting justice on Braunschweig's city centre during the night October 15, 1944. Today reminders of the war can still be seen, such as what's left of the Hotel Handelshof.
Villa Rimpau on Wolfenbütteler Straße 2 is named after its first owner, the landowner and businessman Arnold Rimpau (1856-1936). The villa was built in 1881-82 by the architect Constantin Uhde in a neo-classical style. In 1932 it was bought by the Braunschweigische Lebensversicherungsbank and sold a year later to the Nazi Party. On the 24th September 1933 it was consecrated to the office of the NSDAP district leader of the City of Brunswick. The first district leader was Wilhelm Hesse (1933-1938), followed by Arnold Krebs (1938–1940), Kurt Beier (1940–1944) and Berthold Heilig (19 March 1944 to 8 May 1945). The building was renamed "Adolf Hitler house"and dubbed the " Brown House ". In addition to the NSDAP district leadership the German Labour Front and the Gauinspektion Brunswick were also headquartered in the villa. During the Second World War the bombing of the 15th October 1944 severely damaged the building forcing the district leadership on 1 November 1944 to withdraw to the Veltheimsche house on Burgplatz until April 12, 1945.
The former "Reichsakademie für Jugendführung", a NSDAP Hitlerjugend college.

The Akademie für Jugendführung Braunschweig was responsible for instructing and training the most high-ranking leaders within the Hitler Youth. Today it serves as the Braunschweig Kolleg.
Nazi Housing estates in Braunschweig

Immediately after the takeover in 1933, the National Socialist idea of creating a visible volksgemeinshaft was carried out in Brunswick. Brunswick happened to be the geographical centre of the new industrial area of the city between the "KdF car" (Wolfsburg) and the "City of Hermann Goering Works" (Salzgitter). Through industry growth and the increasing number of industrial workers, the population and thus the need for housing increased. In 1934 the first major pilot project was the communal settlement Braunschweig-Lehndorf. The second model settlement was from 1936 to 1939, the German Labour Front-settlement Mascheroder Holz was realised. From 1938, a third project, the SA-settlement in Rühme began.  
Rathenaustaße then and now
Saarstraße
On 21 March 1934 the groundbreaking for the Gemeinschaftssiedlung Lehndorf was made. Here about 2,600 housing units in the form of small settlements with gable roofed single or double houses were created. Upon completion of the first phase in 1936 funding was because of the high infrastructure costs and the money needed for the weapons programme.
 Hitler visiting the settlement in 1935
 Flag ceremony in front of the elementary school
After his visit, Hitler ordered Lehndorf, a symbol of the new order and the centre of the party in the volksgemeinshaft symbolising the idea of ​​unity of party and state.  In front of the tower, which housed the living quarters of the youth organisation, a memorial hall was built. The area in front of the building served as a playground as well as having a branch of the State Bank, and a health centre.
The Besenmännchen in the Neustadt in 1939 and today. Sculpted in 1938 by Jacob Hofmann, it represents the ideology behind the national socialist community through the "racial cleansing" of the "inferior" and politically "unreliable."

The Gemeinschaftshaus

The interior has been extensively remodelled
  For more: http://www.vernetztes-gedaechtnis.de/lehndorf.htm

Quakenbrück (Lower Saxony)
Adolf Hitler Strasse then and now

Celle                                                                             
The photo on the left shows Otto Telschow (Centre) with the Kreisleiter of Celle, Walter Pakebusch (Left), Hans Kerrl (Right). Both contemporary photos are from the Am Markt during the reopening of the Schlosstheater on May 13 1935.
The entrance to the Otto-Telschow-Hause during the Third Reich; today it serves as the Volkshochschule. Telschow had joined the Nazi Party in 1925, and was the founder of the regional Nazi newspaper, the Niedersachsen-Stürmer. In October 1928, he was appointed Gauleiter of the Nazi party's regional subsection Gau Eastern Hanover, a post he retained until the end of World War II. Telschow gained more influence after 1935, when the Nazi-party Gaue usurped the functions of the streamlined German states. In 1930 he was elected to the Reichstag for the Ost-Hannover electoral district, and remained a member until 1945. He was taken prisoner by the British Army at Lüneburg and committed suicide in prison by slashing his wrists.
The "Viktor Lutze-house" was inaugurated on 30 October 1938 in the name of the President of the Province of Hanover and SA Chief of Staff Viktor Lutze. Of special significance was its soup kitchen, previously located at Hannoversche Strasse 54, and operated as part of the DRK of the Vaterländischen Frauenverein (Patriotic Women's Association). For the new building in the Fundumstraße the city acquired the land and built the building at its own expense. The inauguration itself was celebrated on a grand scale and to a large audience.
Today it houses the German Red Cross.
The "Kraft durch Freude" (Strength through Joy) shop on Bergstrasse 1a which offered day and longer vacations, in particular trips to the party rallies in Nuremberg. KdF had its own "sports official", led by sports courses and sports events. Kdf held a "People's Education Centre", which had a wide range of courses, sometimes explicitly Nazi themes such as "racial biology". Musical offerings such as group singing and music lessons as well as tickets to operettas and concerts.
 On 8 March 1933 the swastika flag was hoisted atop the Celle Town Hall. SA, SS and Stahlhelm had provided the honour guard to the sound of the Horst Wessel Song. Four days later, municipal elections were held and, close to the national count, the Nazi Party managed 42.9%. Mayor Ernst Meyer was retained in office by the Nazis, whilst the senator Ernst Harmful (SPD), was forced to resign and senator Wilhelm Mohr escaped a dismissal only through early retirement.
In the foreground of the period photo is the Braunes Haus.
The Oberlandesgericht then and now. The Nazis wanted to make justice a compliant instrument of their state. The courts found themselves exposed to a variety of measures whilst the judges themselves largely lost their independence, many responsibilities having been transferred to the Special Courts and the People's Court, police and Gestapo. 
The President of the Celle Higher Regional Court (OLG), Adolf von Garßen (1884-1946), was one of only two presidents in the German Reich, which prior to 1933 conducted a Higher Regional Court until 1945 when they were removed by the British. With the majority of his fellow judges, he joined the Nazi party on 1 May 1933. The President played an important role, because he was involved in enforcement of Nazi policy points. 
In April 1933, the Nazis enacted the so-called Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums which made ​​it possible to remove officials the nazis objected to. Besides Social Democrats and Communists, it was aimed at mainly Jews, for in this Act, for the first time an "Aryan paragraph" inserted. The Senate President, Dr. Richard Katzenstein (1878-1942) was removed from office due to his Jewish ancestry.
 
 The Städtische Union, was the "largest and most traditional" venue in Celle. Both cultural and political events took place here, and the Celle National Socialists used it before 1933; in February 1931 a nazi speaker from Berlin spoke here on "The German woman fighting with the Nazi man for the German soul", in March 1932 the nazis held a campaign rally referring to "racial issues", and ended with the "Horst Wessel Song". Also on 30 July 1932, on the eve of the election, in the "crowded great hall" a major gathering took place with more following during the course of the year. On 30 September the Braunschweig State Minister Klagges spoke in the Union about requirements for Party members, and on 12 October a "25-man strong Nazi banners Chapel 77" during an "army marching evening".
The last elections in 1933 were accompanied by events in the Union. In addition to the many events of the Celle NSDAP, its various branches, such as DAF and NSA, and other associations and clubs, with a regional focus and more political nature, were also held here: for example, a presentation of the "Ostmark" poet Josef Hiess and lectures on the topic "The East Germany calling" as well as various lectures sponsored by "Strength through Joy" on German literature.
The events of the Nazi Party increased not only in frequency, but were apparently also getting bigger, so the Celle district administration wrote in April 1935 that "the Union can no longer hold so many people and major events should be held in the open air." As a result, the district administration in January 1936 asked the city to create a "large sound system" for such events, which could then be lent to the party.
A Nazi Christmas party in one of the rooms

For more on Celle during the National Socialist period: http://www.celle-im-nationalsozialismus.de

   The British had their first experience of a Nazi death camp near Celle as they advanced towards the Elbe in the second week of April 1945. The 11th Armoured Division was pushing towards its military objectives when its forward troops were met by a Mercedes staff car containing two Wehrmacht colonels. They had come to offer them Bergen-Belsen camp, where, they said, the inmates were dying of typhus. It was three days before the British entered the camp, and they were naturally horrified by what they saw.
   Belsen was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz, Treblinka or Majdanek. It had been set up as recently as 1943 to house ‘exchange Jews’. These were Jews with non-German passports who Himmler believed could be bartered for money or for German nationals in Allied captivity. The idea of selling Jews to the West went back to the abortive Evian Conference of 1938. Conditions at Belsen had been as good as any until the end of the war, when the SS began driving the inmates of the camps west, in order to prevent them falling into the hands of the advancing Red Army. As much as possible, evidence of the Final Solution was to be destroyed. Hitler was furious with Himmler when he learned on 13 or 14 April that the Americans had liberated Buchenwald and found 20,000 prisoners the SS had failed to evacuate or shoot. Hitler had barked into the telephone at the SS chief: ‘. . . make sure that your people don’t become sentimental!’
   Large numbers of former prisoners from eastern camps were shipped into Belsen. They were not only Jews. Estimates for the number of Jews in Belsen at the time of the liberation vary, but at most they were not much more than half. There were prisoners from all over Europe as well as the usual concentration camp inmates: political prisoners, ‘anti-social elements’ and criminals – including homosexuals – who had contravened Article 175 of the Prussian Legal Code. Not only were the food and medical supplies inadequate to deal with them, but they brought typhus. Lack of food had resulted in outbreaks of cannibalism. By the time the British had made up their minds to go in, the plague had reached epidemic proportions. Over the next few weeks a quarter of the 60,000 inhabitants would die. Most of these were deemed to have been beyond medical care, but some died because the British were at a loss to know how to treat and feed them. In hindsight it is easy to accuse them of negligence, but they still had military objectives. There was a war to be won, and a pressing need to prevent the Red Army from absorbing the whole of Germany. Himmler knew that many Britons wanted to push on and fight the Russians, and while he bartered Jews with the Swedish count Bernadotte, he hoped that he himself might be retained in the fight against Bolshevism.
  The living skeletons of Belsen wrought their revenge on the hated kapos, throwing some 150 of them out of first-floor windows under the eyes of the British soldiers.

Bergen-Belsen
This camp was not only the destination of many evacuation marches, but also operated as a reception camp for sick prisoners from other concentration camps. The first transport arrived at the end of March: a thousand prisoners from Dora, most suffering from tuberculosis; only fifty- seven of these survived to the end of the war. In the following months, the men’s camp in Bergen-Belsen developed into the largest Sterbelager, absorbing transports of sick prisoners from the entire concentration camp system. Thousands were freighted there, from Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme, Friedrichshafen, Magdeburg (Brabag), Ohrdruf, Flossenbürg, Leitmeritz, and Leonberg. The Sterbelager had the function of relieving the subcamps by absorbing sick prisoners and lowering the mortality there. The death blocks and Sterbelager had the same function for the camps inside the Reich as the Birkenau gas chambers had for the subcamps of Auschwitz.
Wolfgang Sofsky (250)

A British Army bulldozer pushes bodies into a mass grave at Belsen on April 19, 1945 whilst on the right is seen mass grave 3 wherein Dr. Fritz Klein, a German doctor at the camp, can be seen in the foreground standing amongst the corpses.

 SS camp guards are made to load the bodies of dead prisoners onto a lorry for burial before British flamethrowers set the barracks in Belsen ablaze.
The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945 by the British 11th Armoured Division. 60,000 prisoners were found inside, most of them seriously ill, and another 13,000 corpses lay around the camp unburied. The scenes that greeted British troops were described by the BBC's Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied them:
...Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.
This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.




Churchill visited the camp following his trip to Aachen to receive the Charlemagne Prize. Sir Martin Gilbert's Volume VIII ("Never Despair," p. 1197) mentions the visit but gives no details. Anthony Montague Browne's Long Sunset mentions the visit on page 207, specifically the visit to Celle, (below), but is also scarce on details. 

Bergen-Hohne Training Area (Truppenübungsplatz Bergen-Hohne) Lower Saxony
Scenes of the area in the 1930s. It currently covers an area of 284 square kilometres (70,000 acres), making it the largest military training area in Germany.

Under British control, the training area was steadily expanded and, since the 1960s, has also been used by the German Armed Forces (the Bundeswehr) and other NATO troops. On the right shows Sir Winston Churchill visiting May 13, 1956.
Hoppenstedter Strasse with reichsadler above the door, still overlooking the entrance
Established by the Wehrmacht in 1935, at the end of war it was taken over by British occupation forces and some of its facilities used as a liberation camp for survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which was located a few miles away.
One of the most notorious DP camps was Bergen-Belsen. Once the British had managed to bring down the death rate it was possible to introduce some degree of comfort into the camp, especially when the inmates were moved out of the old buildings and into the well-appointed ϟϟ barracks. That took a while. At first witnesses were horrified to see how dehumanised the former prisoners had become. Many of the Jews were women, and General Dempsey, commanding the British Second Army, recalled seeing one ‘standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated’
Goslar (Lower Saxony)
Reichsbauernstadt (Reich Peasant City, City of the Reich Food Corporation)

Hitler inspecting an honour guard during the Reichsbauerntag
Hitler in front of the Imperial Palace in Goslar on the occasion of the Harvest Festival in 1934 and the same site today.

Hanover (lower Saxony)

Adolf Hitler Straße then and now; the hauptbahnhof remains as a reference point
On top of the 18-metre column erected in 1936 by the Hannover town counci is a 4.5-metre statue of the torchbearer by Hermann Scheuernstuhl for the official inauguration of the Nordufer des Maschsee, a man-made lake in the town. Poised on a sphere, the nude figure actually maintains his Hitler salute whilst holding the Olympic flame carried to the Games from Olympia for the first time in 1936. The "Victory Column" glorified the Nazi state on its plinth inscription, from which the swastika was struck off in 1945. On its base with the reichsadler still prominent is inscribed:
Wille zum Aufbau
gab werkfrohen Händen
der Segen der Arbeit
Freude, Gesundheit und Kraft
spende fortan auch der See!
1934 - 1936
Also on Maschsee is Arno Breker's lion sculptures.
Breker was simultaneously representative of those who chose to collaborate with the Nazi leaders and exceptional because of his stature within the Third Reich. Breker produced monumental sculptures that have become closely identified with the regime, and indeed, he was one of the most celebrated artists in Nazi Germany. Breker’s Faustian bar- gain included changing the style of his art. His work shifted from a variant of naturalism, where he was strongly influenced by August Rodin, to a monumental and characteristically fascist idiom.21 Until his death in 1991, he was never able to acknowledge that he had compromised his art or helped sustain the Nazi regime. Like many other figures in this study, Breker’s later years were characterized not only by rehabilitation, but also denial.
 The main synagogue during the time of the Reichskristallnacht, November 9-10 1938
Its subdued and barricaded replacement on Haeckelstraße, with memorial in front

Glauchau (Saxony)


Glauchau railway station in 1941 and today


Magdeburg (Saxony-Anhalt)

The Dom with the memorial to the SA in front during the NSDAP era, now gone.

Hasselbachplatz then and now
After the war. Magdeburg was where the Soviets took Hitler's remains:
When the Soviets’ Operation Myth was launched in 1946 to establish the real sequence of events leading to Hitler’s death, some of Hitler’s personal staff were brought back to Berlin and the bunker, in order to point out the precise details of the suicide and subsequent burning in the garden. The bones, for the time being, were stored in Magdeburg. Of particular importance were the objects in Hitler’s personal collection. For them an aircraft was laid on as Stalin wanted his bones examined by his foremost experts. The Führer’s skull was eventually put into a paper bag and deposited in the State Archives.
MacDonogh (385) After the Reich
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