Wittekind-Hildasglück mine, Volpriehausen, Uslar, Northeim District, Lower Saxony, Germanyi

Regional Level Types
Wittekind-Hildasglück mine	Mine (Built Over)
Volpriehausen	Village
Uslar	Municipality
Northeim District	District
Lower Saxony	State
Germany	Country

Ancient potash mine, closed around 1925 and no longer accessible.

The Wittekind-Hildasglück potash plant in Volpriehausen in the south of Lower Saxony is a disused mine for the production of potash salts. The facility served as a Wehrmacht ammunition facility during the Second World War. In the final phase of the war, cultural assets were stored underground to protect them from destruction.

The creation of the Volpriehausen salt dome

The Volpriehausen salt dome is one of around 200 known deposits of this type in northern Germany. The salt layers from which the deposit was formed were formed around 260 million years ago at the time of the Zechstein, when seawater evaporated in a shallow basin. The salt layers were later covered by further deposits and are now at a depth of around 3000 meters. In a weak zone of the basement, the salts have penetrated the hanging layers (halokinesis or salt tectonics). The salt in the upper part of the salt dome was dissolved and washed away by the groundwater. What remained was poorly soluble anhydrite and clay. These formed the gypsum cap over the actual salt deposit.

Discovery

The Justus I trade union, founded on November 27, 1895 in Cologne, owned several legal entities in the Uslar area with a total area of ​​17.1 km². From 1896 onwards, three deep boreholes were drilled to find potash deposits. While boreholes I and II at a depth of 545 and 463 meters respectively detected potash salts with up to 97.5% potassium chloride, borehole III at a depth of 485 meters was unsuccessfully drilled in older rock salt.

Wittekind mine (Justus)

This mine was located in the east of Volpriehausen.
Work on the shaft, initially called Justus, began in 1898 and was completed in 1901 without any major difficulties. The circular shaft had a diameter of 4.25 meters and was 558 meters deep. Production levels were set up at depths of 480, 494, 518, 534 and 540 meters and cross passages were excavated to the east and west. It turned out that the deposit was heavily folded and therefore blind shafts and substation construction were required for further exploration.

After the sinking work was completed, the surface facilities such as the winding machine house, shaft hall with headframe, raw salt mill, boiler house and electrical center, as well as the potassium chloride factory for processing the potassium salt into fertilizers were built. The factory started production in 1904. 300 to 400 tons of hard salt* could be processed every day. There was also a saltworks for producing table salt.

*Hard salt is a mining term for salt rocks that are generally harder than rock salt (halite). Hard salts consist of around 65% rock salt and around 15% of the potassium salt sylvite and varying proportions of the sulfates kieserite (kieseritic hard salt) or anhydrite (anhydritic hard salt).

The Justus union was converted into a stock corporation based in Volpriehausen in 1906 in order to acquire additional capital through the sale of shares. In 1915, financial transactions were carried out, in the course of which Justus AG acquired the majority of the Ellers and Carlshall potash works. Together with the Hildasglück union, a mining group was formed that was named Wittekind-Bergbau AG. At the same time, the Justus shaft was renamed Wittekind. In 1921, the shares of Wittekind-Bergbau AG were taken over by the Krügershall union and thus came to the Burbach group, part of what later became Burbach-Kaliwerke AG.

As part of rationalization measures, the Burbach-Kaliwerke shut down the potassium chlorine factory in 1921 and only had kainite and rock salt mined at the Wittekind-Hildasglück potash plant. In the years 1924 to 1925, further explorations of high-quality potash salts were started. Due to the improved economic situation, investments were made in a separate Weser port in Bodenfelde and the saltworks were extensively modernized.

Hildasglück mine

This mine was located in the northwest of Ertinghausen.
The history of the Hildasglück union goes back to the Hardegsen potash drilling company, which acquired 16.8 km² of mining fields in the districts of Hardegsen, Ellierode, Lichtenborn and Ertinghausen in 1896. The Kalibohrgesellschaft was sold to the Dortmund union in 1905 and renamed Hildasglück in 1906. A total of four deep boreholes carried out between 1896 and 1909 only revealed moderate potash outcrops. Nevertheless, the majority of the Hildasglück union's shares were acquired by Justus in order to sink a second shaft for the potash plant in the Hildasglück field. To finance this, the Justus potash plant leased its share of the German potash syndicate for five years to the Günthershall, Alexandershall, Glückauf-Sondershausen potash plants and the Prussian state.

In 1910, work began on the Hildasglück shaft, which reached a depth of 160 meters in the same year. Due to heavy water inflows, which at times amounted to 1200 liters per minute, the shaft tube was expanded to a depth of 578 meters with segments. The final depth of 949 meters was reached in June 1915. Levels were excavated at depths of 794 and 917 meters and then connected to the Justus shaft. The surface facilities only consisted of a few buildings and a cable car to the Justus potash plant. From 1913 to 1922, the trades demanded a total of 16.5 million marks in surcharges to cover the construction and sinking costs.

In the following years, the Hildasglück shaft served exclusively as a ventilation shaft for the potash mine.

Subsequent use as an army ammunition facility from 1938 to 1945

The Wehrmacht was interested in the mine as early as 1936, but initially found the location unsuitable. The Burbach-Kaliwerke then offered the facility for rent to the Wehrmacht, which accepted the offer and moved in in July 1937. In 1938, potash production was stopped and massive renovations and new construction of various facilities began with the aim of building an army ammunition facility. An industrial area consisting of 12 factory halls was built in the forest between the two shafts; The mine building, which was expanded into around 200 cells, was intended for storing ammunition. In 1940, the Heeresmunitionsanstalt Volpriehausen ("Volpriehausen Army Ammunition Facility") began producing infantry grenades. During the course of the Second World War, forced labourers, prisoners of war and internees from the Moringen youth concentration camp were increasingly used to produce ammunition. In addition, large parts of production were relocated underground in order to maintain ammunition production despite bombing by the British and Americans. From 1944 onwards, more and more cultural assets were temporarily stored in lower-lying parts of the mine that were not used to store ammunition; including parts of the library of the nearby University of Göttingen.

After the forced labourers were liberated and the US Army occupied the facility in April 1945, the entire complex was damaged and chaotically looted. At this point, there were still around 20,000 tons of explosive material underground, some of which were damaged by looters. This created a significant risk, which made the controlled removal of the ammunition, but also the viewing and recovery of the stored cultural treasures, very difficult. On the night of September 29, 1945, there was a devastating underground explosion that severely damaged the mine and made it impassable. It was not until the next spring that the shaft was temporarily reopened; volunteers partially salvaged the cultural assets from August to October 1946, before groundwater seeping in flooded the sections and made any further salvage impossible. The cultural assets remaining in the shaft are therefore probably irretrievably lost — especially since they had often been only provisionally packaged.

Current state (2010)

The former mine site of the Wittekind mine is located on the southeastern outskirts of Volpriehausen in a triangle between Schachtstrasse, the B 241 and the Ottbergen-Northeim railway line. Most of the buildings have disappeared and there is now a residential and industrial area in their place. The former electrical center, a workshop building and the foundations of the cable car are still preserved. The Wittekind shaft is fenced in and covered with a concrete slab to protect the shaft. Some residential buildings from the first ten years of the plant have been better preserved than the operational facilities, such as the former Steigerhaus and a dormitory for workers on the Bollertstrasse and the director's villa on the Schachtstrasse.

The production area of ​​the former ammunition factory is located northwest of the Wittekind mine on the edge of the forest, halfway to the Hildasglück mine.

Today there are almost no traces left of the Hildasglück shaft deeper in the forest; only a spoil heap with salt-containing rock lying immediately south of it on a mountain slope can be seen as a remnant. Due to the lack of vegetation and leaching processes, this has an appearance that is colloquially described as the “moon surface”. Until well into the 1990s, the area of ​​this shaft was fenced off with a high chain-link fence. The actual shaft, which was around 3 meters in diameter, was covered with a concrete dome and around 15 meters further west there was an uncovered large hole with a diameter of around 10–15 meters. Nowadays, these two appear as a dredged depression, with the shaft site still covered over.

The Volpriehausen Potash Mining Museum, founded in 1985, commemorates these facilities.

Other Databases

Wikipedia:	https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaliwerk_Wittekind-Hildasgl%C3%BCck
Wikidata ID:	Q1722328

Other Regions, Features and Areas containing this locality

References