Kriegerehrenmal in Lütgendortmund, Gefallene 1914-1918, 1939-1945

The Kriegerehrenmal in Lütgendortmund stands on the north side of the Evangelical St. Bartholomäus Church in Dortmund. A heavily structured wall of differently treated sandstones separates a small street-level plaza from the higher church grounds. The church itself provided the land for the monument. Step onto the plaza and the stone above you records 476 local soldiers who fell in the First World War.

A 1925 proposal set the project in motion, and a committee collected the names of Lütgendortmund's fallen. Strunck & Wentzler Architekten BDA made those names the core of an otherwise architectural design. Citizens gathered for the unveiling on 1 December 1929 beneath a grey sky. Four long rows of smooth slabs run along each side of the wall, the names ordered by year of death. Three protruding crossbars connect the rows, and the upper one shows marching soldiers with shouldered rifles. The middle crossbar bears the inscription "Unseren Helden 1914 1918." The lower one carries a relief of a fallen soldier lying down.

War struck the wall itself: impact holes remain visible in the stones, and postwar replacement slabs left most of the lettering unreadable. The inscription along the top edge survives incomplete, and parts of the upper edge are missing. Two bronze swords once stood on that edge. In 1994 the Dortmund artist Theodor Nöker redesigned the memorial, adding a stylized oversized barbed wire facing the street. A plaque set into the ground reads "Den Opfern von Krieg und Gewalt zum Gedächtnis den Lebenden zur Mahnung." Those words remember the victims of war and violence and turn the old hero worship into a warning to the living. The memorial remains one of the few monuments without an added inscription for the dead of the Second World War. The impact holes in the sandstone carry that memory without words.