Dobristroh oder Freienhufen, Horka oder Wehrkirch?

NS-Umbenennungen von Ortschaften und ihr Schicksal in der SBZ/DDR

Abstract

Nazi ideology marked a new dimension of the political use of place names in Germany - not only in terms of the huge number of renamed places, but also with regard to the quality of the changes. In the 1930's thousands of place names were changed in the Eastern provinces of the Third Reich. The aim underlying these changes was to cleanse the map by erasing Slavonic (Sorbian, Polish) and Baltic historical elements present in those place names. Most of the changes took place in Eastern, Prussia, Upper Silesia and Eastern Pomerania, which today are Polish and Russian territories. Less known is the fact, that there was a considerable number of changes in those territories, that after the Second World War constituated the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany (1949-1990 the German Democratic Republic), especially in the region of Lusatia inhabited by both Germans and Sorbs. Based mainly on archive material, the article looks at the historical background for the ideological use of place names in two totalitarian systems: Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. It tries to give an answer to the following questions: Which parts of the territory in question were most affected by the Nazi renaming action? How did Nazi authorities manage to implement the place name changes? How can we classify the changes from an onomastic point of view? How can we explain that only 55% of the Nazi renamings were cancelled after the end of the Second World War? How can we explain the difference between Saxony on the one hand (where nearly 80% of the historical names were restored after the war) and Brandenburg on the other hand (where most of the Nazi names are still official names today)? The central issue for both the implementation of Nazi name changes in the 1930's and for the question of maintaining or rejecting Nazi place names after 1945 seems to be the minority problem, i.e. the German-Sorbian relations. What is most striking for us today is the contrast between official East German antifascist propaganda and the tacit admission of Nazi language symbols to live on not only on the place name signs of towns and villages, but also in the consciousness of the people.