Site History
The site was first settled in 1919 and used agriculturally, with a market garden and small farm animals. Ownership of the site was then transferred to the SS at the beginning of the 1930s. Before the Olympics in 1936, the site was used for German military cavalry riders to do their equestrian training. After that, the site was used as a training camp for leaders in the Hitler Youth and League of German Maidens (National Socialist youth movements). The Sportlerheim Belzig (Athletes’ Home) was built as a destination for holidays organised by the Kraft durch Freude movement. In the 1950s, the East German trade union federation took over the property and used it as a training school for officials. At the beginning of the 1960s the site was taken over by the foreign intelligence service of the GDR (HVA). It was used as a training centre for reconnaissance abroad. The school was under the direct command of the Head of Foreign Intelligence, Markus Wolf. After a top agent called Werner Stiller fled to the West and revealed the existence of the espionage school in 1988, it was decided to change the school's location and turn this site into a sanatorium. The renovation work was still being carried out when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Work stopped and the property was transferred to the Treuhandanstalt. In 1991, ZEGG GmbH purchased the site for 2.1 million German marks. Since then, ZEGG has untertaken numerous landscaping and other ecological measures to regenerate the flora and fauna on-site. The ZEGG community has researched the site history, collecting old photos, historical documents and other accounts. There is an exhibition about the site’s history in the large seminar building.
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Famous quotes containing the words site and/or history:
“I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)