Karstwanderweg - Circular route 15 around the Hellengrundbach

This circular route opens up the Steingrabental nature reserve – Mackenröder Forest, characterized by a multitude of large, young, and partly water-filled sinkholes, some of which are silting up as alder swamps. The mostly dry Steina stream and the spring brooks of the Ichte flow through the area. Before the border was opened, it was home to black stork and wildcat, lying completely quiet.

The path leads from Nüxei first along the Karstwanderweg and the old road section up to the state border, and then for about 1.5 km over an old railway embankment, today a forest management road. The embankment, a considerable earthwork, stands as a monument for millennia and speaks for itself, testifying to slave labor in the midst of the South Harz homeland. Despite thousands of concentration camp prisoners from Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and Hungary being driven to exhaustion by kapos and SS with clubs, starving, freezing, or barely surviving subsequent death marches and massacres, the blood toll was in vain.

In seven months, almost the entire route was completed; a 22 km long main Reichsbahn line as a double-track bypass between Osterhagen and Nordhausen. The period from June 1944 was one of misery and death. At the beginning of April 1945, the construction site and camps were evacuated ahead of the advancing Allies. In six concentration camp subcamps, prisoners from Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora were housed as the III. and IV. SS construction brigades in the South Harz: Osterhagen, Nüxei, Mackenrode, Wieda, Günzerode, Kleinwechsungen, Ellrich. The sites and history of these camps and the suffering of their inmates must not be forgotten.