Wolfstein, Rhineland-Palatinate
Wolfstein was founded in 1275 on Habsburg King Rudolph I's orders, which called for a “fortified and free” town near his castle, “Woluisstein”, now known as the "Alt-Wolfstein" (“Old Wolfstein”) ruin. Rudolph forthwith granted the new town the same town rights and freedoms as the town of Speyer. As an “everlasting marketplace”, it was to be a sanctuary for commerce, trade and dealing. The first townsmen and -women came from the surrounding, much older villages.
Wolfstein, Rhineland-Palatinate
On the Roßbach municipal council, too, the Nazis won a majority. Public servants such as police officials, municipal officials, field and forest rangers and the chief of waterworks were replaced with men who were true to the National Socialist ideology. The Party and its many organizations more and more came to define the town’s economic and cultural life. Thus, in 1933, the local singing clubs were merged into the “Westmark” singers’ association, the chamber of commerce, which had been founded in 1899, was dissolved in 1934 “under approval of all present” and the local "Jugendleite" (secular coming-of-age ceremony) was held on Confirmation Day, causing 189 people to leave their religious community. The town, which 100 years earlier had been associated with the struggle for democracy, was now welcoming, with a majority among its population, Nazi dictatorship. Once the Nazis’ goals had become manifest, however, it was too late to turn back. Wolfstein was largely spared any material destruction in the Second World War; however, the human toll was quite heavy: on Wolfstein’s war memorial to the fallen, built in 1930 at Neu-Wolfstein castle, a further 100 names now had to be chiselled; over in Roßbach, the 1931 war memorial bore 44 new names after the war.