Planten un Blomen for the Hamburg folk comrades

On June 6, 1935, the Governing Mayor of Hamburg, the National Socialist Carl Vincent Krogmann, inspected an honorary deputation from the Reich Labor Service. The men lined up near the Dammtor train station. They wear the mustard-yellow uniform of the RAD, spade on their shoulder, eyes straight ahead. Then he opens the Low German garden show "Planten un Blomen" (Low German for plants and flowers). It should show, according to Krogmann in his pithy speech, "what the whole of National Socialist Germany is capable of in the field of flower and plant cultivation."

The Hamburg newspapers that have been brought into line have already reported on the event beforehand. "Germany's largest garden show before the opening" and "No one will recognize the zoo grounds" are the headlines. Reichsbauernführer Darré, who promoted the construction of the new park, speaks in a greeting to the German people "deepest longing for the clod". And the "leader of the German horticulture" wants to train "hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens" in horticulture here.

Planten un Blomen:unemployed to the shovels

The Hamburg Nazi leadership urgently needs success. The mood in the Hanseatic city is bad a few years after the takeover. Merchants' business is stagnating and many workers are still unemployed. The idea for a large park on the outskirts of the city center suits the new gentlemen in Hamburg, in addition to Krogmann the Reich governor Karl Kaufmann. It comes from the tourist office, which probably wants to build on previous successful garden shows in Hamburg and Altona. At the same time, hundreds of workers can be employed and urban splendor and bourgeois "normality" can be simulated to the population.

Planten and Blomen need space

The area for the new park covers around 20 hectares and is located behind the Dammtor train station. The Zoological Garden was located here until 1930, the first director of which in 1863 was Alfred Brehm, who later became world-famous animal researcher. Then, for a few years, a public park with a roller coaster and a motorboat route, which is now being demolished. In addition, part of the old Dammtor cemeteries, which have been closed for decades, are to be redesigned.

Hans Meding, head of Hamburg's gardens and cemeteries, is responsible for the planning, but he leaves most of the work to the 30-year-old garden architect Karl Plomin. They begin work in the fall of 1934. First, the old zoo buildings have to be demolished, foundations blown up, ponds thrown in, graves transported to Ohlsdorf Cemetery.

The cost triples

The time for the design of the garden show is short. The opening date was set early on, and the organizers did not consider postponing it. So the welfare authority sends more and more long-term unemployed. In the beginning there are 150 workers, later 850, in the weeks before the opening the number increases to 1,800 men. They move around 150,000 cubic meters of soil, lay 177,000 clinker bricks for the footpaths, plant 276,000 summer flowers, 73,000 shrubs, 35,000 carnations, 10,000 gladioli and 6,000 roses, among other things. The costs estimated at four million Reichsmark tripled quickly.

Water cascades and skating rink

The young architect Konstanty Gutschow designed the entrance buildings behind the Dammtor train station - today there is a high-rise hotel on this site - and a 150 meter long cactus hall. In the park, a meadow of summer flowers greets visitors. White walls enclose rose gardens. The center of the facility is a large rectangular water basin, which is to be used as an ice skating rink in winter. A long canal with several cascades leads towards it from the west.

There are also exhibition halls for special flower shows, a spacious restaurant with a terrace as a relic of the zoological garden, and in front of it a music pavilion in modern glass and concrete construction for square concerts. Allotments and show gardens and some thatched settlement houses are intended to offer visitors examples of living and gardening under National Socialism.

Banana, bamboo and cacti

There is a massive farmer's tavern at the Great Basin, also under thatch and with colorful beams. The real attraction, apart from the long cactus walkway, is the exotic orchid café at the western end of the park. Rare tropical plants grow here in glass cases that separate the café from the terrace with its colorful parasols. Between banana trees and bamboo you can feel the big world here. Opposite, green plate plants from the Amazon swim in a heated pool on the water.

In fact, the approximately 800,000 visitors who came to the garden show by October 1935 saw hardly anything "Low German" apart from the farmer's tavern. The financial administration has not approved other large buildings such as the fishermen's cottages planned by Meding and Plomin in the Halligen. In Planten und Blomen, geometrically strict garden ideas from the National Socialist era, which can also be found at the Maschsee in Hanover, are combined with the most modern technical elements and, above all, flowers "from all over the world", as Plomin writes in the accompanying booklet.

Planten and Blomen:amusement park, but not for everyone

Even if the trade press soon criticized the facility as a "sophisticated, metropolitan restaurant garden", Mayor Krogmann had it expanded into an amusement park in the years leading up to the Second World War. Recreation, distraction and distraction for the "comrades" are apparently more important to the political leadership than North German fishermen's cottages and cottage gardens. Childcare, pony rides and book lending are also part of the programme.

In the very first winter, the large pool becomes the largest ice rink in Germany. A roller skating rink and a concert hall are opened, as well as an aquarium restaurant with a shark tank. In the evening, a light fountain inspires the people of Hamburg. In 1938, the largest giant cacti show in the world can be seen in the cactus corridor, which the cactus researcher Curt Backeberg compiled on behalf of the city on an expedition to Mexico. Millions of visitors came to Planten and Blomen before the war. However, Jews are no longer allowed to enter parks in Germany at this time.

Start of war prevents expansion into NS Monumental Park

Meanwhile, the plans of the Nazi authorities continue. The new chief architect in Hamburg, Konstanty Gutschow, who won the competition for the monumental redesign of the northern bank of the Elbe in the style of Nazi architecture in 1937, wants to build a much larger park for the Nazi holiday organization "Strength through Joy" at the Dammtor, with an outdoor pool and "marchment area ". The plans are abandoned after the start of the war. In 1941, the Ministry of Propaganda in Planten un Blomen exhibited weapons captured by opponents of the war, a little later concentration camp prisoners had to produce cement blocks here in the freezing cold.

Little remains of the original park

After the air raids on Hamburg also destroyed the park, later international garden shows in 1953, 1963 and 1973 largely changed the grounds. Today, in addition to the sundial between the park lake and the music pavilion, the cascades and the walls of the rose garden are reminiscent of the 1935 garden show.

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NDR television / Hamburg Journal / 06/21/2015 / 7:30 p.m.