History
The first traces of settlement date to the Old Stone Age, but the first recorded mention of Blankenburg goes back to 1123. The Saxon duke, Lothair of Supplinburg, installed Poppo, a nephew of Bishop Reinhard of Halberstadt, as count at the castle, which stood on a bare limestone rock on the site of the present castle. The name of the town derives from this castle.
Count Poppo I of Blankenburg very probably came from the Frankish noble family of Reginbodonen. His descendants were also subject to the nearby Regenstein Castle. This was a fief from the Bishopric of Halberstadt like the County of Blankenburg, also called the Hartingau. In 1180/82 Frederick Barbarossa had Blankenburg devastated because it had pledged "sole allegiance" to the Welf, Henry the Lion. In 1386 Blankenburg suffered heavy destruction again.
Following the death of the last count of Regenstein, John Ernest, the county went in 1599 as an agreed enfeoffment (erledigtes Lehen) back to the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg. During the Thirty Years' War Blankenburg was hard pressed by Wallenstein and was occupied in 1625. Nine cannonballs embedded in the walls of the town hall evince this difficult time.
The dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg turned the place into a secondary residence in the 17th century and it enjoyed its heyday under Duke Louis Rudolf (1690–1731), the second son of Anthony Ulrich of Wolfenbüttel. Rudolf was given Blankenburg in 1707 as a paragium. At the same time the County of Blankenburg was elevated to the status of an imperial principality (Reichsfürstentum) which was ruled independently until 1731, but then, because Louis Rudolf became a duke, was reunited with Brunswick where it remained. The present-day Little Castle with its terraced garden and baroque pleasure garden stems from that period. From 1807 to 1813 Blankenburg belonged to the Kingdom of Westphalia.
In the Seven Years' War the absolute neutrality of the town made it a safe refuge for the Brunswick court. Louis XVIII also stayed in Blankenburg under the name of Count of Lille from 24 August 1796 to 10 February 1798, after his escape from Dillingen.
In the early days of Nazi era, those who opposed the Nazi regime were persecuted and murdered. In a notorious campaign by Brunswick SS commander, Jeckeln, in September 1933, 140 communists and social democrats were herded together in the inn, Zur Erholung. Here and in the Blankenburger Hof they were severely beaten, some dying as a result. During the Second World War the Blankenburg-Oesig subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp was set up in the Dr. Dasch (Harzer Werke) Monastery Works and, shortly thereafter, subordinated to Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Here some 500 prisoners had to carry out forced labour in the monastery factory and Oda Works. In addition, there was a work camp run by the Gestapo for "half-Jews" who were forced to do hard labour. Another camp was occupied in February 1945 by inmates of the Auschwitz subcamp of Fürstengrube and managed as Blankenburg Regenstein subcamp.
As part of the division of Germany into occupation zones in 1945, Blankenburg district was actually assigned to the British zone in accordance with the Potsdam Conference and London Protocol. But because the larger eastern part of the district was linked to the rest of the British zone only by a road and a railway, the boundary was adjusted and Blankenburg incorporated into the Soviet zone. The largest part of the district thus ended up later in East Germany and became part of the state of Saxony-Anhalt. The main part of the former Free State of Brunswick went to the British zone and thus became part of Lower Saxony.
The tunnels of the Regenstein-Blankenburg facility were used from 1974 by the National People's Army (NVA) in the GDR as a large ammunition depot. In 1992 the Bundeswehr were given the 8 km long tunnel system and established there, "the largest underground pharmacy in the world": both for routine Bundeswehr missions, but also for disaster relief around the world and for cases of serious military "operations".
Read more about this topic: Blankenburg (Harz)
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