by Friedrich Wein
Numerous participants at the Interfest Annual General Meeting took the opportunity to visit another fortress city. In the week following the Annual General Meeting, the 5th International Biehler Fort Conference in Poznan-Poznan from 22.04.2024 - 27.04.2024 offered the opportunity to visit the second city in Poland with a belt of Biehler forts.
The journey from Thorn-Torun to Poznan could be shortened halfway by visiting the Exploseum near Bydgoszcz. A factory for the production of nitroglycerine was built and operated there by DAG during the Second World War, large parts of which are still preserved and small parts of which can be visited, including an exhibition worth seeing.
The Poznan-Poznan fortress also has a lot to offer, not just Biehler forts. However, the symposium was dedicated to these and therefore the focus was also on them. Forts Va, V, VI and VIa as well as Fort VII with its connecting battery offered a deep insight into these fortifications. This was also due to the fact that both Forts V and VIa were demolished in the 1960s in favour of an urban motorway, which was never built.
Fort Winary, as the citadel of the fortress is called, as well as several infantry bases such as I-Room 21, show the generations of fortifications before and after. After the heavy fighting in 1945 and the transformation into a city park, hardly any of the fortress buildings are visible above ground. The fortified cathedral lock, the hussar barracks and the railway caponiers showed that not only the large fortifications are interesting objects of study.
This continued with a visit to the BASA bunker, a railway administration bunker that now houses a Tecno club, and the Colomb pub, a building from the city's defences. With the Museum of Military History in the Citadel and the Polish Army Tank Museum, two well-equipped collections were included in the sightseeing programme, which rounded off the participants' impressions. Fort VII, on the other hand, was very thought-provoking, as a concentration camp was located there between 1939 and 1945, in which both Polish citizens and people with disabilities died in preparation for Aktion T 4.
The city of Poznan was severely destroyed in January and February 1945 during heavy house and fortress battles. Reconstruction after the war, including the old town centre and the imperial castle, was a success. Around the market square with the striking town hall, there is no trace of the fighting.
In 2025, the 6th International Biehler-Fort Conference will take place in Cologne from 8 April 2025 to 13 April 2025.
Illustration: In the interwar period, the I-room 21 received an MG stand as an extension (Friedrich Wein).
Leave a Reply