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Oranienburg is a large district city and medium-sized center on
the Oberhavel with around 45,000 inhabitants and is located a few
kilometers north of the Berlin city limits. Oranienburg is located
in the south of the Oberhavel district in the area where it merges
with Berlin and belongs to the natural area of the Zehdenick-Spandau
Havel lowlands. The city center of Berlin is about 35 kilometers
away. Oranienburg lies on the Havel and the Oder-Havel Canal.
Neighboring communities
Immediate neighboring communities are
(clockwise from the north): Löwenberger Land, Liebenwalde, Wandlitz
(Barnim district), Mühlenbecker Land, Birkenwerder, Hohen Neuendorf,
Velten, Leegebruch, Oberkrämer and Kremmen.
From the beginning to the Thirty Years War
Archaeological
finds show that the city emerged from a Slavic settlement, which was
probably called Bochzowe. The German settlement of today's urban
area took place in the course of the second eastward expansion in
the 12th century while maintaining the old Slavic name. At the point
where Oranienburg Castle is today, a castle was built at the
beginning of the 13th century to protect the area and the important
river crossings. In 1216 the place was first mentioned as “Bothzowe”
when the Brandenburg Bishop Siegfried II confirmed his archdeaconate
rights to the Brandenburg Cathedral Chapter when he assumed office.
In 1232 "Bochzowe" was granted city rights. The townspeople caught
fish and traded fish and agricultural products. In 1483 the official
seat of Bötzow was created from “Bochzowe”. With the conquest of
areas further east of the city, the castle lost its importance, and
a two-story hunting lodge was built in its place by the Brandenburg
Elector Joachim II. During the Thirty Years War Bötzow was burned
down and looted.
Reconstruction and expansion of the city
In 1650, the Elector of Brandenburg, Friedrich Wilhelm, gave the
Bötzow domain to his wife Louise Henriette of Orange. In 1652 a
Dutch-style castle was built in Bötzow, which was named Oranienburg.
In 1663, Louise Henriette set up the first European porcelain
cabinet here. The castle name was also transferred to the city. The
old name Bötzow was given again in 1694 to the nearby place, which
had been named Cotzebant until then. A sister of Louise Henriette,
the namesake of the city of Oranienburg, was Henriette Catharina von
Oranien. She married Johann Georg II von Anhalt-Dessau and from 1683
had today's Oranienbaum Castle built, from which the town of
Oranienbaum in today's Saxony-Anhalt developed. With the support of
Dutch experts and religious refugees (Huguenots, Salzburgers, Jews),
the Electress had model farms built in and around Oranienburg based
on the Dutch model. It created an essential prerequisite for the
rapid development of Brandenburg-Prussia. From the marriage of the
Great Elector with Louise Henriette, Elector Friedrich III. who had
the castle embellished and expanded in memory of his beloved mother.
In 1701 he founded the Kingdom of Prussia as Friedrich I. After the
castle had to be sacrificed to the austerity constraints of the
“soldier king” Friedrich Wilhelm I, Prince August Wilhelm, a brother
of the childless Frederick the Great and father of the Prussian king
Friedrich Wilhelm II, once again brought courtly splendor to
Oranienburg. In his hikes through the Mark Brandenburg, Theodor
Fontane reports in detail and vividly on the eventful history of
Oranienburg.
Industrialization
In 1802 the castle was sold
to the pharmacist Johann Gottfried Hempel with the obligation to
build a cotton weaving mill. The war against France brought cotton
production to a standstill in 1807. In 1814 a sulfuric acid factory
was built in the castle, which was the first in Prussia to use the
lead chamber process. In 1833 Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge discovered
aniline and carbolic acid in coal tar, in 1835 the first stearin
candles were made in the factory, and in 1840 the first paraffin
candles. In 1848 the production facility was relocated from the
castle to the mill field. In the castle, which was renovated after a
fire, a Protestant teachers' seminar was opened in 1861, which was
operated until 1926.
On July 10, 1877, Oranienburg received a
train station for the newly opened Berlin Northern Railway Berlin –
Stralsund. On May 28, 1883, 18 Berlin vegetarians founded the first
vegetarian settlement in Germany in the western part of the city:
the "Vegetarian Fruit Growing Colony Eden GmbH", in which the money
reformer Silvio Gesell lived for many years and finally died. The
construction of the Oder-Havel Canal from 1906 to 1912 revitalized
economic life in the city. In 1912 the company Heintze & Blanckertz
set up the first factory for steel springs. The resulting cold
rolling mill in Oranienburg, which employed up to 7,000 people, was
bought up by Krupp after 1989 and closed. The most modern plant at
the time was sold to China.
Time of the nationalsocialism
On March 21, 1933, the SA set up the Oranienburg concentration
camp as the first concentration camp in Prussia in an old brewery
for the imprisonment of opponents of the National Socialist regime
from Brandenburg and the Reich capital Berlin. More than 3,000
prisoners were detained there until July 1934, at least 16 of them
died. In July 1936, the SS built the first large concentration camp
complex with the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the boundaries
of the city of Oranienburg and the independent community of
Sachsenhausen on a wooded area of initially 80 hectares. During
the war, the camp was expanded to a size of approx. 400 hectares.
Close to the main camp, on the Hohenzollern Canal, was the
Oranienburg clinker works subcamp, where the prisoners had to
produce or work on bricks and natural stones for the conversion of
Berlin to the capital Germania.
Oranienburg was badly damaged
by aerial bombs during the war. This is due to the war-important
works in the city. On the one hand there was the Auerwerke, which
stretched on the site of today's housing estate on Lindenring and at
the train station as far as the Havel, and the Heinkel-Werke, of
which only the redeveloped white city and parts of the works
airfield in the south of the city still exist . The explosive force
of the bombs that destroyed the Auerwerke production facilities
resulted in the release and distribution of the radioactive material
processed there. Since then, Oranienburg has been the most
radioactive place in Germany.
German Democratic Republic
The grounds of the former Heinkel AG, the associated company
airfield and parts of the former White City factory settlement were
occupied by the Red Army and used by the Soviet Armed Forces group
in Germany until they withdrew in 1994.
In August 1945 the
Soviet special camp No. 7 von Weesow was relocated to part of the
site of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There the
Soviet occupying power interned mainly members and functionaries of
the Nazi movement and the Nazi state, including many members of
criminal organizations of the “Third Reich”, on the basis of Allied
decisions on automatic arrest. Increasingly, the Soviet secret
service also locked people who had been convicted by Soviet military
tribunals in an area on the same site that was specially separated
from the “internees”. Above all, there were also people who, for
political or other reasons, had actually or supposedly rebelled
against the Soviet occupation regime. Of the total of 60,000
prisoners, including women, young people and even children, 12,000
died by 1950, the year the camp was closed, due to hunger and
epidemics as well as from the consequences of catastrophic prison
conditions.
On April 23, 1952, Oranienburg became the
district town of the newly formed district of the same name in the
GDR district of Potsdam. Sachsenhausen has been part of the city of
Oranienburg since April 1, 1974.
Various military units,
associations and institutions were stationed in Oranienburg during
the Cold War. At the end of the 1980s, for example, the Motorized
Rifle Regiment 1 "Hans Beimler" of the National People's Army of the
GDR and the border training regiment 40 "Hans Coppi" of the border
troops of the GDR as well as the 239th Independent Helicopter
Regiment of the Soviet Western Group of Troops.
Since the
reunification
With the district reform of 1993, Oranienburg
became the district town of the new Oberhavel district, in which the
Oranienburg and Gransee districts were incorporated. In June 1994
the units and associations of the former Soviet and now Russian
western group of troops withdrew from Oranienburg.
In the
course of the collapse of the GDR and the reunification of Germany,
many companies were closed and many jobs were lost. However, a
number of companies could also be restructured and continued and new
businesses settled. Residential areas were newly built and
fundamentally renovated, streets, footpaths and cycle paths were
newly laid out. A mixture of old and new residential and commercial
buildings characterizes the historically grown cityscape. So were z.
B. After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops, the houses in the
White City were renovated, and a quiet residential area was created.
On October 26, 2003 Friedrichsthal, Germendorf, Lehnitz, Malz,
Schmachtenhagen, Wensickendorf and Zehlendorf were incorporated. On
September 23, 2008 the city received the title Place of Diversity
awarded by the federal government.
In 2007 there were plans to build a Chinatown in Oranienburg.
Under this name they also included activities and possible residents
with other Asian backgrounds. However, these plans were abandoned in
2008 for economic reasons and because the distance to the center of
Berlin was felt to be too great.
In 2009, Oranienburg hosted
the fourth Brandenburg State Horticultural Show under the title
Dream Landscapes of an Electress. It ran from April 25 to October
18, 2009. The main preparation project was the redesign of the
military wasteland behind the palace into a park and thus the
restoration of the palace gardens. For this purpose u. a. a new
castle harbor and a Havel promenade created. In addition, the
routing of the main road was changed and the bridge route used until
1901 was restored with a newly built castle bridge. This is how the
palace square regained its central importance for the city. At the
same time, a previously missing third axis was created with the
construction of Nehringstrasse between the palace and the district
office, thus taking into account the baroque city layout. The city
of Oranienburg bought numerous ruins and properties in order to
remedy the urban grievances. As a result of these measures, the
historical center of Oranienburg was significantly redesigned and
sustainably upgraded. In addition to the city administration, the
renovated palace now houses a museum of the Prussian Palaces and
Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg and the regional museum of the
Oberhavel district.
The Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum
have been extensively renovated and modernized by the Brandenburg
Memorials Foundation since 1993. With over 700,000 visitors
annually, it is now the third largest concentration camp memorial
after Auschwitz and Dachau. The history of the Oranienburg and
Sachsenhausen concentration camps as well as the history of the
Soviet special camp and the GDR national memorial site are presented
in 13 permanent exhibitions, almost all of which are in original
buildings, with numerous original artefacts, documents and help
different media illustrated. An educational department offers
projects, guided tours and an audio guide, and the archive and
library are also accessible to visitors. If interested, visitors can
deepen their knowledge in numerous publications issued by the
memorial, including various interactive media.
In connection
with the state horticultural show, a block of flats, the so-called
sound barrier, was torn down on Berliner Strasse. A small park was
created there to further improve the quality of stay in the
medium-sized town. In terms of content and design, the park refers
to the first German radio play on radio. It dealt with the rescue of
participants in Umberto Nobile's failed North Pole expedition with
the airship Italia and was written by Friedrich Wolf, who spent the
last years of his life in the Oranienburg district of Lehnitz.
Because of the extraordinarily intense bombing of Oranienburg in
World War II, several duds - more than half of them with chemical
long-term detonators - have to be recovered every year. In 2012,
around 300 explosive bombs with LZZ were still suspected in the soil
of the inhabited urban area. After more than 70 years in the ground,
self-detonations are becoming more and more likely due to the aging
processes of the trigger mechanism. The federal government has so
far rejected the requests from the state of Brandenburg for
financial support to clear the explosive bombs. Although Oranienburg
is the only city in Germany that systematically searches for duds,
according to the current state of financing, Oranienburg soil will
not be cleared of duds until around 2070.