Horst Wessel monument in Lower Saxony

The Horst-Wessel-Denkmal was a Nazi memorial built for Horst Wessel, an SA leader killed in Berlin in 1930. Its remains lie in the Süntel hills north of Welliehausen in Lower Saxony. Planned from 1933 and finished in 1938, the site sits at about 370 metres above sea level. A straight line of sight ran twelve kilometres south to the Bückeberg, where the Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festivals were held each year between 1933 and 1937. The project was backed by SA leaders in Hannover, the Hameln-Pyrmont district and the town of Hameln, who argued Wessel’s ancestors had lived in the Weser uplands. The memorial’s purpose was to glorify Wessel as a martyr of the movement. Similar monuments were erected in Bielefeld and Mainz, but the Süntel site was chosen for its view of the Bückeberg festival grounds. Construction followed plans by the landscape designer Wolf and was carried out by master mason Röbbecke from Pötzen. A concrete core and steel reinforcement held up a 12-metre stone column topped by a five-metre iron swastika. The surrounding plaza could hold more than a thousand people and was inaugurated on 26 February 1939. Today only fragments remain: parts of the foundation, the pedestal and two six-metre sections of the column. The area is now overgrown with vegetation and crossed by a hiking trail. No sign marks the ruins, though nearby an information board stands at an old quarry as part of a local heritage project. In 2010 a small group of far-right marchers reached the site on the 80th anniversary of Wessel’s death, an incident filmed by passers-by. The remains are the last surviving pieces of any Horst-Wessel memorial in Germany.