Showing posts with label Bacharach. Show all posts. Nazi Sites in the Rhineland. The rathaus in bedecked with the old Wilhelmine and Nazi flags and today with the red ensign from my bike. In the early summer of , there had been attempted a coup in Speyer for an autonomous Palatinate which ended up failing miserably, mainly due to the resistance of the Deputy District President Friedrich von Chlingensperg auf Berg.
In the French occupation forces withdrew. When the Nazis too power Speyer had initially belonged to the "Gau Rheinpfalz", which was merged with the Saarland to form the Gau Saar-Pfalz in The administrative seat of the district was in Neustadt, which thus outstripped the Bavarian state seat of government Speyer in importance during the Nazi era.
The Speyer synagogue on Heydenreichstrasse was burned down in the November pogroms on November 9, and demolished shortly afterwards. Over an hundred Jews from Speyer and the surrounding area who were no longer able to escape were killed.
Resistance to the Nazis was attempted by the Speyer Comradeship group around the Speyer Social Democrat Jakob Schultheis and his wife Emma. Apart from the area around the railway station, Speyer suffered no major damage from air raids during the war. Einst und jetzt During the war, Speyer was the site of one of the first encounters between pilots and UFOs, or Foo Fighters as they were called at the time:.
In an encounter o n November 27, over Speyer, pilots H e nry Giblin and Walter Cleary reported a large orange light flying at mph about 1, feet above their fighter. The radar station in the sector replied that there was nothing else there. Nevertheless, a subsequent malfunction in the plane's radar system forced it to return to base. An official report was made - the first of its kind - which resulted in many jokes at the pilots' expense.
