Neumünster (Low German: Niemünster and Neemünster) is an
independent city and a regional center in the middle of
Schleswig-Holstein. With around 80,000 inhabitants (as of 2019), the
Fairtrade city is the fourth largest city in Germany's northernmost
region after Kiel, Lübeck and Flensburg. Neumünster is particularly
known as the “horse town” for the McArthurGlen Designer Outlet and
the Holstenhallen.
Mentioned in a document for the first time
in 1127 as the Augustinian monastery "Wippenthorp im Gau Faldera",
Neumünster was a center of the German cloth and leather industry for
a long time and has been an important traffic junction since time
immemorial. In possession of city rights from 1870, the large
medium-sized town on the Schwale has been part of the Hamburg
metropolitan region since May 2012.
The Augustiner Stift Neumünster was founded in 1127
by the missionary and later Bishop of Oldenburg and Holy Vizelin
(also Vicelin), mentioned in a document under the name Wippenthorp
in the Gau Faldera. The current name can be traced back to the Novum
Monasterium (the "New Minster") built by Vizelin, whose name was
first mentioned in 1136. In this document Vicelin and his
congregation were granted the right to mission in the Slavic region
up to the Peene by Archbishop Adalbert von Bremen and the income
that had belonged to the church in Wippendorf from ancient times was
transferred. The monastery was moved to Bordesholm around 1330.
Neumünster was on the eastern branch of the Ochsenweg, which
crossed the Cimbrian Peninsula in a north-south direction.
Furthermore, the trade route Lübsche Trade crossed the Neumünster
area in an east-west direction.
In 1498, Augustinian nuns
founded a monastery on the so-called Klosterinsel, a former river
island of the Schwale, which is now in the city center. This was
dissolved in 1566 after the Reformation.
For the fish farming and the operation of mills around 1503 monks
dammed the swallow for the first time. The mill pond was created in
today's city center. A year later, the stain, now small stains,
burned off.
In 1637 there was a major fire of unknown cause
in Neumünster, in which the majority of the houses were destroyed.
Neumünster's heyday as a cloth-making town began in 1760 with the
establishment of the “privileged woolen factory” on the monastery
island. It was the first factory to be built in Neumünster.
In 1769, the Großflecken completely replaced the Kleinflecken as a
marketplace. Until 1948 all markets took place here. These included
a weekly market that had been approved since 1764 and previously
only took place once a year on the anniversary of the death of John
the Baptist.
In 1780 there was another major fire that
destroyed all the houses on Plöner Strasse and some of the houses on
Großflecken (a total of 46 houses).
In 1808,
Spanish-French troops took Napoleon's quarters in Neumünster. With
their high demands, they put a heavy burden on the city.
Schooling has been compulsory in Neumünster since 1813. Initially,
two “preparatory schools” were set up.
After the dissolution
of the Holy Roman Empire and the Napoleonic Wars, Holstein became
part of the German Confederation in 1815, but was still ruled in
personal union by the Danish king.
The post office, which was
a major economic factor in the city, decided in 1816 to set up an
"extra post station" and connection points to the fast stagecoaches
to Kiel and Altona, among others. Shortly thereafter, daily mail was
introduced. Riders and coachmen made up to five deliveries every
day.
In 1817, a fire that broke out in Großflecken destroyed
several houses between Teich and Lütjenstrasse.
The
industrial age began in Neumünster in 1824 when the Renck cloth
factory imported a steam engine from England. However, three years
later the factory was destroyed in a fire and 150 people lost their
jobs. However, the factory was rebuilt and operated until 1884. The
cloth maker Hans Lorenz Renck (1840–1893) later built the first
fully integrated cloth factory and thus combined all production
steps in one house.
The foundation stone for the
Vicelinkirche on Kleinflecken was laid in 1828. The Vicelinkirche
was consecrated on May 11, 1834. The builder was Christian Frederik
Hansen. At the same time, a school for the poor was set up for
children from socially disadvantaged parents. There was also a
“factory school” for children who had to do child labor, but this
was closed in 1893 because the work of school-age children was
banned.
From 1832 the Altona-Kieler Chaussee ran through the
town. The then sovereign, King Friedrich VI. by Denmark, built
between 1830 and 1832. The official inauguration took place in 1834.
The old Bundesstraße 4 followed the Chaussee in the Neumünster area.
There are milestones in Einfeld, in Tungendorf, on Altonaer Straße
in front of the Holstenschule and between Wittorf and Brokenlande.
The industrialist Renck was very committed to a railway
connection between Neumünster and Rendsburg. After five years of
effort, the line went into operation in 1845, after the first
Neumünster Railway had opened on the Kiel – Neumünster – Altona line
in 1844.
After some professors from Kiel on July 20, 1846 called on the
population to rebel against the Danish authorities, the so-called
patriotic rebellion against Danish rule gradually arose until 1848.
After initial support, however, Prussia concluded a separate peace
with Denmark in 1850, leaving Holstein and Schleswig on their own.
The troops of the two duchies were finally subject to the Danish
army in 1851.
In 1852 the first water pipeline at least
partially ended the situation where water had to be drawn from wells
or rivers.
In 1857 Rencks Park was created on the
southeastern edge of the monastery island.
House numbers were
introduced in Neumünster in 1860. A year later, a railway repair
shop was set up, which over the decades has grown into one of the
largest employers in the city.
After the German-Danish War in
1864 and the German War in 1866, Neumünster became part of the
Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein in 1867, like all of
Holstein.
In 1870 Neumünster received city rights. The
development of the city in the second part of the 19th century was
largely shaped by the emerging textile industry and the expansion
into a railway junction in the center of Holstein. Due to the good
rail connection to the port of Hamburg, via which both raw hides and
tannins were imported in large quantities, as well as the lack of
restrictive water legislation in Schleswig-Holstein until 1913, an
important leather industry was able to develop.
Numerous
factory chimneys were part of the Neumünster silhouette until the
1970s. The city coat of arms shows this to this day.
In 1869
the founding meeting of the first Neumünster volunteer fire brigade
took place and on July 1, 1914 the Neumünster professional fire
brigade was founded.
In 1871 the Holsten School was founded
as a private school for boys from the upper middle class. The
founding of the private secondary girls' school, which is now called
the Klaus Groth School in Neumünster and has been state-owned since
1925, also took place at this time.
In 1872 the first
permanent garrison was moved to Neumünster. After the withdrawal in
1897, the Infantry Regiment No. 163 finally became. Together with
its sister regiment Lübeck it formed the 81st Infantry Brigade of
the 17th Division of the IX. Army Corps - 17th Reserve Division of
the Northern Army during the First World War - stationed in a
barracks built especially for this purpose (later the Sick
barracks), where it remained until it was dissolved after the First
World War.
The first large department store, a branch of
today's Karstadt AG, was opened around 1891, but completely
destroyed in 1944 and only rebuilt in another location in 1964.
In 1901 Neumünster became an independent
city. In 1903 the Volksbank eG Neumünster and in 1910 the bathing
establishment on Klosterstrasse were opened. During the First World
War, Neumünster was of strategic importance because of its cloth,
leather and metal industries. In the turnip winter of 1917, however,
many people died of starvation.
Between 1913 and the
mid-1920s, the workforce rose from just under 5,200 to over 10,100.
At the same time, the proportion of workers in the cloth industry
fell from 45.8 to 35.4%, while the proportion of those employed in
the leather industry rose from 32.7 to 45.3%.
After the cloth
manufacturer Hans Lorenz Renck had donated Rencks Park to the city
of Neumünster in 1870, it was opened to all citizens in 1921.
The Schleswig-Holstein NSDAP was founded in Neumünster on March 1, 1925 under the later Gauleiter Hinrich Lohse. The party had a lot of success in the predominantly nationally conservative population of Schleswig-Holstein and Neumünster. The National Socialists also came to power in Neumünster. The most powerful person in Neumünster was the NSDAP district leader Hans Christian Hingst, who was appointed to the Reich Commissariat Ostland in 1941 by his NSDAP Gauleiter Lohse. SS-Hauptsturmführer Hinrich Möller stood by as police director. With the takeover of the police by an SS functionary, the rule of law in Neumünster was completely eliminated. All civil servants and functionaries in the city who were democratically or even constitutionally minded were dismissed. Communists and other people regarded as enemies of the state were taken to a concentration camp for alleged protective custody; in Neumünster the police prison served for this purpose. Soon some of the new rulers committed the first murders. With Möller's participation, the two communists, Christian Heuck and Rudolf Timm, who were imprisoned in the prison, were murdered in early 1934.
Nazi functionaries and activists also persecuted Jews in
Neumünster. In 1930 about 30 residents were Jewish. According to the
Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, around 70 people were counted as
Jews in 1933. During the boycott of Jews (April 1, 1933), Jewish
businesses were violently boycotted, and at the same time Jewish
officials were dismissed or retired (see Aryan paragraph). Most of
the Jewish lawyers had to give up their profession. As early as
1933, in the course of "Aryanizations", businesses that belonged to
Jews were taken over. In 1935 there were again major anti-Jewish
acts of violence.
In Neumünster, too, the Jewish residents
were attacked in their sleep by SA and SS men during the night of
the Reichspogromnacht in the night between November 9 and 10, 1938.
Their businesses were destroyed. The SA and SS men broke into the
apartments of the Jews - children, women and men - with violence and
roaring and smashed the inventory and / or threw it on the street.
In addition, the beds were cut open, the feathers poured out, and
windows were smashed. Victims were often mistreated. All Jewish men
were arrested during this operation. During the day, the SA led the
arrested “Action Jews” through the city in a pillory parade. The
wife of Heinz Baronowitz, who was murdered in Wewelsburg
concentration camp in 1942, reported that her husband had to wear a
poster hanging around his neck with the text: I murdered von [sic]
Rath. The men were interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
for a few months. By the end of 1939, all but a dozen Jewish
residents had to leave Neumünster.
A major company in the
German leather industry, Adler & Oppenheimer AG, was "Aryanized" in
1940/41. H. Taken from the Jewish owners and renamed Norddeutsche
Lederwerke AG. The Jewish residents who remained in Neumünster and
other places in Schleswig-Holstein were deported to Riga in the late
autumn of 1941 to the Reichskommissariat Ostland subordinate to
Hinrich Lohse, which had been established as German territory after
Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. There these
people were housed under adverse living conditions in the Riga
ghetto or in the Jungfernhof camp and later murdered.
The
Nazi regime began rearming the Wehrmacht soon after taking power. In
1934 Neumünster was again a garrison town. The infantry regiment No.
46 and part of the artillery regiment No. 66 moved into the old Sick
and the new Hindenburg barracks (which later accommodated the 6th
Panzer Grenadier Division of the Bundeswehr) as well as the newly
built Scholtz barracks (named after the artillery general Friedrich
von Scholtz).
Between 1935 and 1938, the 240 hectare
Neumünster airfield was built in the west of the city. The
Holstenhallen (today a modern multi-purpose hall in which, among
other things, the annual NordBau construction fair takes place) was
built in 1939 as a cattle auction hall and then used as an aircraft
assembly hall from August 1939.
There was a first Allied air
raid in Neumünster in 1941. Seven more air raids followed by April
25, 1945, the heaviest of which on April 13, 1945. Neumünster was
destroyed by 20 to 30 percent.
Germany ultimately lost World
War II. At the end of the war, Neumünster was declared an "open
city" and handed over to British troops on May 3, 1945 without a
fight. Just one day later, Hans-Georg von Friedeburg signed the
surrender of all German troops in northwest Germany, the Netherlands
and Denmark on behalf of the last Reich President Karl Dönitz, who
had previously left with the last Reich government in
Flensburg-Mürwik further north. On May 8, the war finally ended with
the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht.
Like the rest of Schleswig-Holstein, Neumünster belonged to the British zone of occupation at the end of the war. Since "at the end of the war the Allies did not know whether the German population would also totally capitulate", the British occupiers set up Civil Internment Camp No. 1. All persons were interned there who were presumed to have been important functionaries of the NSDAP. In the fall of 1945, 11,000 people were imprisoned there. Among them "there was a comparatively high proportion of suspected war criminals, for whom the British secret service - mostly successfully - searched". Many of the others were soon released because the British did not have enough documents about the many people who had been incriminated. The camp was closed in autumn 1946, and the remaining 6,000 inmates were transferred to the Eselheide internment camp near Paderborn.
At the same time, Neumünster experienced a wave of refugees. In
1947 Neumünster had 66,945 inhabitants; 16,375 of these were
displaced or refugees, i.e. almost one in four. In order to counter
the resulting lack of living space, a large part of the military
airfield area was converted into a new housing estate, the new
Böcklersiedlung district, from 1950 onwards. This was named after
Hans Böckler, the first DGB chairman who personally laid the
foundation stone at the start of construction.
During the
period from 1933 to 1945, some streets were renamed after National
Socialist greats and so-called "martyrs". The latter were mostly
members of SA and SS groups who had died during the Weimar Republic
in the phase of power gain before 1933 in mostly self-instigated
violent confrontations with members of democratic parties or
communists.
Martin Martens, SS man from Wattenbek, who died
in 1931 in a shootout with KPD and Reichsbanner people on the
Gänsemarkt.
Adolf Hitler, "Führer" of the German Reich from 1933
to 1945.
Dietrich Eckart (1868–1923), editor-in-chief of the
Völkischer Beobachter and former confidante of Hitler.
Wilhelm
Gustloff (1895–1936), regional group leader of the NSDAP foreign
organization in Switzerland, shot in 1936 by a German-speaking
Yugoslav student of Jewish origin who wanted to set an example
against the discrimination against “Jews” in Germany.
Hans Schemm
(1891–1935), Minister of Culture in Bavaria, Gauleiter of the
Bavarian Ostmark and head of the National Socialist Teachers'
Association, died in a plane crash.
During the period from
1945 to 1947, the British occupying powers named some street names
after the locally deployed military personnel. Some of these people
could be identified:
Colonel Combe, member of the military
government in Neumünster.
Colonel Crompton, Commandant of the
Neumünster Military Governorate.
Major Norton, first British city
commandant.
Pat Wilson, American Air Force and Administration
Officer.
Tremsletts can probably be seen as a fictional person,
because the Gartenallee did not previously have an offensive name.
But there was a British interrogation center here. On a whim, the
officers gave this street its name, which can be interpreted as
"Avenue of the Trembling".
Neumünster lies on the edge of a wide sandy plain in the Holstein
Geestrück. This part of the Holstein Vorgeest, the so-called
Neumünster Meltwater Plain, was raised by meltwater and the sands in
it from three glacier gates near Timmaspe, Einfeld and Bornhöved. In
the area of today's Einfelder See there was a glacier gate during
the Vistula Ice Age, so that the sander root located there is
considered the most important for the filling of the Neumünster
area. In the far north, in the area of the Einfelder See and the
Dosenmoor, the hill country of East Holstein reaches the urban area.
The Schwale flows through Neumünster, which flows into the Stör in
the south of the city.
Kiel is about 30 kilometers north of
Neumünster, while to the south it is about 70 kilometers to Hamburg.
The city, which has been an independent city since 1901, borders
clockwise on the districts of Plön, Segeberg and
Rendsburg-Eckernförde.
Due to its location in Central Europe, Neumünster has a humid, cool, temperate transitional climate that is neither very continental nor very maritime. The average annual temperature is 8.1 ° C, with 775 millimeters of precipitation per year. The driest month is February with 47 millimeters of precipitation, the wettest month is August with 84 millimeters. The coldest month is January with an average of 0.1 ° C, the warmest month is July with an average of 16.6 ° C.