An Abandoned Field – Unearthing The Tannenberg Memorial (Poland & Berlin #34b)

The entire history of the German experience between 1914 – 1945 is symbolized by an empty field in northern Poland. This was where the Tannenberg Memorial stood for almost twenty years. The Memorial was the spiritual home of interwar German militarism in East Prussia, a German province seething with reactionary revanchism. The memorial commemorated the German victory at the Battle of Tannenberg in the opening weeks of World War One. The Germans went on to lose the war and famously lost postwar peace. The Tannenberg Memorial was a response to those losses. It proclaimed victory in defeat. The memorial was the scene of huge nationalistic and Nazi-inspired rallies. It provided the Germans with a rallying point during the interwar period. One that goaded them on to the next war and where they suffered total defeat. The Tannenberg Memorial did not last either. It suffered partial demolition and looting until there was barely anything left except an empty field.

Piece of history – Remnant of the Tannenberg Memorial

Surreal Experience – Interest & Indifference
A couple of days before visiting where the Tannenberg Memorial once stood, my travel companion and I went to the ruined Wolf’s Lair (Wolfsschanze), Adolf Hitler’s military headquarters for the Eastern Front in the Masurian Lakes region of northeastern Poland. I expected the site to seem sinister and creepy. Instead, it felt overwrought and useless. To me, the Wolf’s Lair was little more than a novelty. Worth seeing, but of no lasting value. Everything that happened there was without success. From defeat on the Eastern Front, to the botched assassination attempt on Hitler’s life by Claus von Stauffenberg. The Wolf’s Lair was ultimately a monument to failure. One large ruin after another, devoid of any redeeming value other than as curious relics of a regime in catastrophic decline. My interest soon turned to indifference.

I had the opposite experience picking through the scant remains of the Tannenberg Memorial. A walk around the site was a surreal experience. Weeds, tufts of grass, and unsightly brush were conspicuous. By the standards of landscapes, the setting was intensely mediocre. It was hard to imagine that tens of thousands of people once stood in this same space for the dedication of the Memorial in 1927. Or that Hitler and his henchmen held some of their most sinister ceremonies on this ground. I could not even imagine bird watching here, let alone a torch light procession. To be quite honest, it was hard to imagine anything of note had ever happened on such an average piece of property. This sacred ground for the Nazis was now shrouded in obscurity.

In the trenches – Tannenberg Memorial

Open Wounds – Grounds For Dismissal
Time had not been good to the Tannenberg Memorial’s remains. While some like to say that time heals all wounds, in the memorial’s case, time had only covered most of the wounds in moss and weeds. A closer inspection showed that the ground here had yet to heal from the monumental monstrosity which once covered it. In several places, the remnants of brick work were randomly scattered across the ground. Every so often something crunched beneath my feet. This signaled that I was standing on small pieces of the monument. Some of the pieces were easily visible. Stooping down, I would see a bit of brick that had once been part of a much larger structure. Trying to make sense of what part of the former memorial my friend and I were standing on was impossible. We did not have a map of the memorial’s layout. This oversight did have a good side effect, we were forced to use our imagination. 

More and more pieces of the Memorial began to materialize the further we walked into the site. On one end of the property. I discovered what appeared to be a ditch. I soon plunged several meters into an overgrown trench. My friend soon joined me. We found pieces of brick strewn across the bottom and a larger portion on one side. Some of these pieces were still embedded in the ground. The ditch may have been part of the original structure, or it might have been part of earthworks that were sculpted around the memorial. The architects wanted to create a perception of the Memorial as an impregnable fortress. One that would honor some unknown German soldiers who had fallen in the Battle of Tannenberg. Later, Paul von Hindenburg, the commanding general at Tannenberg would be deified at the Memorial, when Hitler decided to have his body buried here.

The Memorial’s aesthetics were militaristic in the extreme. It was difficult to imagine that at one time there had been eight 20-meter-high towers as part of an octagonal shaped structure. The Memorial was designed to look like a medieval castle used by the Teutonic Knights. My travel companion and I had already visited Malbork Castle, which was once the magnificent headquarters of the Teutonic Knights. It also happens to be the largest castle in the world measured by land area. The Tannenberg Memorial attempted to mimic a semblance of its style and size. While Malbork Castle has survived, the Memorial has not. This was not for want of trying. The Memorial was built to last. Ironically, the Germans would be the ones initially responsible for demolishing parts of it. They could not even succeed at that task. With the Red Army closing in, they fled the area. It would take several generations for the Poles to pick the Memorial apart.

Standing its ground – Remnant of the Tannenberg Memorial

Faith & Fear – A National Shrine
My travel companion soon was urging me to see a different part of the property. That was where he found the most prominent remnant of the Memorial. A hip high square of brick stood by itself. I found the use of brick fascinating. An overwhelming majority of the historic churches in northern Poland are built out of brick. In my opinion, this was not just a case of the Germans using local materials for the Memorial. Whether purposely or subconsciously, much of the structure was built out of brick. The Tannenberg Memorial was in harmony with other sacred structures throughout the region. The Memorial was considered a national shrine, a quasi-religious site for Germany’s uber-nationalists and Nazis. Thankfully, the Memorial has now all but vanished. Nonetheless, there was just enough of it remaining to understand what once stood here and what it stood for. That made the site worth visiting, but only once. That would be enough.

Click here for: Riding The Tannenberg Cycle – August 1914, 1933, 1934 & 1939 (Northern Poland & Berlin #35)

Extinction Event – Discovering the Tannenberg Memorial (Northern Poland & Berlin #34a)

Finding something that no longer exists is difficult, but not impossible. This was the situation my travel companion and I faced on the edge of Olstynek as we searched for the Tannenberg Memorial’s location. We were on a mission to see if the invisible could be rendered visible. Over a forty-year period beginning in 1945, the Tannenberg Memorial vanished. The gigantic memorial, which was built to look like a fortress, was attacked by friend and foe. Germans, Soviets, Poles and thousands of looters all played a role in dismantling the memorial.

Now we were coming to visit the vanquished and vanished. Hoping to see some sort of resurrection in the interests of history. This would take imagination and whatever remnants we could piece together in an overgrown field on the outskirts of an obscure town in provincial Poland. That may not sound appealing or promising, but obsessions rarely do for anyone other than the insatiably curious. All we needed was the promise of seeing a few pieces of the past to fire our imagination. Ultimately, this would help us reconstruct the memorial.

Vanishing traces – Path where the Tannenberg Memorial was located

Mortal Danger – The Fascist Beast
By January 1945, Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich was on the verge of extinction in just its twelfth year. The Germans had already lost the war. It was just a matter of time before Soviet forces overran East Prussia. Their campaign would be particularly vicious since East Prussia was viewed as the heart of German militarism. Red Army soldiers said they were about to enter “the lair of the fascist beast.” The soldiers were hell bent on slaying that beast. Along the way, they would visit destruction on anything in their way.  This included not just German soldiers and civilians, but anything that represented German heritage. Places associated with German military prowess did not stand a chance. The Germans knew this meant that the Tannenberg Memorial was in mortal danger.

Germans had inhabited East Prussia since the Teutonic Knights settled there in the early 14th century. Their long and historic occupation of the region was about to suffer the ultimate death sentence. The execution would be administered by the Red Army in an excruciatingly long and drawn-out process. The worst of the process would occur during the first five months of 1945. On January 13th, the Red Army started their offensive in East Prussia. Eight days later, the Germans began to demolish the Tannenberg Memorial. They refused to allow the monument to be overrun by those they considered racially inferior. Instead, they would do much of the dirty work themselves. The Tannenberg Memorial was as much a monument to Teutonic pride as it was to German militarism. It was to be destroyed by the same people who created it. A bit of darkly poetic, prideful justice.

Nationalist intentions – Photos on signboard of the Tannenberg Memorial & Hindenburg tombs prior to demolition

Low Expectations – Remains of War
After being unable to locate the military cemetery supposedly situated just off the highway leading into Olstynek, I was a bit worried that my travel companion and I would have trouble finding where the Tannenberg Memorial once stood. From everything I had read and seen, few traces of the monument still existed. My expectations of what we might find were not optimistic. A few traces would have to satisfy our curiosity. The thoroughness of Germans is legendary. Thus, I assumed they did their best to demolish the monument. The problem for them was that they had little time to complete the job as the Red Army was closing in fast. The Wehrmacht had other priorities, such as the Battle of Berlin. They were also trying to defend Konigsberg, the largest city and provincial capital of East Prussia further to the north. Nevertheless, there was one very important item at Tannenberg that must be removed before the Red Army arrived. These were the remains of Tannenberg’s victorious general, Paul von Hindenburg.

A Prussian soldier par excellence, Hindenburg died in 1934. Adolf Hitler decided against Hindenburg’s wishes that his remains should rest in a mausoleum at the memorial. In January 1945, those same remains were in peril of being desecrated by another eastern invader. Whereas Hindenburg succeeded in rolling the Russian steamroller back from East Prussia at Tannenberg, Hitler’s forces failed to stem the Soviet tide from washing over East Prussia. If Hindenburg’s bones fell into the hands of Red Army soldiers they would never be seen again. The Germans acted quickly to move the remains of Hindenburg and his wife westward just before demolition activity began on the Memorial. The remains eventually made their way westward and fell into the hands of American troops who reburied them at a church in Marburg, where Hindenburg’s ancestors resided.

Fading away – One of the signboards at the Tannenberg Memorial

Last Remains – A Deceptive Impression
Hindenburg’s remains may have been saved, but the Memorial’s fate was sealed. The Germans used explosives to demolish two of its towers, one that served as an entrance and the other which had housed Hindenburg’s remains. They then did the same to other parts of the complex. Due to the size (48 hectares/120 acres) and stoutness of the Memorial’s construction, the Germans were only able to demolish parts of it. Looters would pick over the ruins for years. Some of the ruins were used as a source of building materials in Olsztynek. This is not unlike how Roman ruins were used during the Dark Ages for shelter or construction materials by those in blighted regions of the former empire. The Tannenberg Memorial’s ruins were still being removed forty years after the war. Eventually the site became little more than a vacant field. This was what we had come to see.

Finding the Memorial’s location was not difficult. It was less than a five-minute drive from the center of Olstynek. A grassy road in good condition led to a small parking area. The closest thing representing an entrance to the derelict site were two signboards for Tannenberg-Denkmal (Tannenberg Monument). One was badly faded, while the other looked newer. Beyond those was a grassy field with scattered patches of weeds. The only thing notable about the field was its lack of cultivation. There was nothing particularly striking about the landscape. A faint path led across uneven ground. At first sight, the field bore no traces of the Memorial. We would soon discover that this first impression was deceiving.

Coming soon: An Abandoned Field – Unearthing The Tannenberg Memorial (Poland & Berlin #34b)