Ludendorff Bridge

A bridge at this point on the Rhine was planned on military-strategic grounds as early as 1912, within the framework of the Schlieffen Plan, along with two further Rhine crossings, the Kronprinzenbrücke at Urmitz and the Hindenburg Bridge; it was built only from 1916, during the war, at the urging of the German generals, and General Erich Ludendorff was a leading advocate for it. It was meant to connect the right-bank Rhine railway, the left-bank Rhine railway and the Ahr Valley Railway (Ahrtalbahn) and to carry troops and supplies to the Western Front. Grün & Bilfinger and Philipp Holzmann built the piers and the masonry arches, the MAN works at Gustavsburg erected the steel river span, and Russian prisoners of war were among the labour used on the site. The Mannheim architect Karl Wiener took part in the architectural design.

The crossing ran 398 metres overall and cost about 2.1 million marks. Its two railway tracks could be planked over the sleepers to take foot troops and road vehicles, and on the eastern bank the line ran into a tunnel through the Erpeler Ley, a hill rising more than 150 metres. Because this was a militarily significant structure, both abutments were given fortress-like bridgeheads: stone towers with fighting loopholes, stores and quarters for the bridge garrison, able to shelter up to a full battalion. An engineer unit and a military police unit were assigned to the site.

On 25 April 1918 Kaiser Wilhelm II gave the bridge the name Ludendorff-Brücke in honour of the First Quartermaster General, General der Infanterie Erich Ludendorff, and on 1 May 1918 it was taken into service; the following day the town council of Remagen made Ludendorff an honorary citizen at an extraordinary sitting. The formal inauguration followed on 15 August 1918, and the only soldiers who crossed the bridge were men coming home from the war. Difficulties with the tunnel through the Erpeler Ley and with the cutting at Erpel held up the track, and the rails could not be laid until the middle of 1919. The Cologne railway directorate took the bridge over on 23 July 1919 and the line, approach routes included, opened to traffic on 1 September 1919. It was the last large building project of the Prussian State Railways.

The designers had built cavities into the concrete piers where demolition charges could be placed. With the Allied occupation of the Rhineland from December 1918 the bridge passed under foreign control, the French filled those cavities with concrete, and it was one of four bridges guarded by American troops. Few trains ran over the river after the First World War, though people from Remagen liked to walk across to Erpel, and from 1926 summer trains ran on Sundays and public holidays from Unkel across the bridge to Ahrweiler and back to Honnef. The French withdrew from the Rhineland in 1930, the remilitarisation came in 1936 with the Wehrmacht, and from 1937 a weekend summer service ran over the bridge again, between Ahrweiler and Königswinter.

Engineers of the Reichswehr and then of the Wehrmacht prepared the bridge carefully for a demolition that might become necessary: selected points had room for 600 kilograms of engineer explosive in all, whose firing would bring the structure down. In 1938, with the Rhineland and the bridge back in German hands, sixty zinc-lined boxes were attached to the girders at key structural points, designed to fire together, wired to a control panel inside the railway tunnel under the Erpeler Ley, with primer cord laid as a backup that could be lit by hand. In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, a bridge guard company took the structure over and prepared it for demolition; after the western campaign of 1940, which began on 10 May and ended on 22 June with the occupation of northern France, the explosive was removed again and taken to a depot near Darmstadt.

On 19 October 1944 the bridge took a heavy Allied bomb hit, and it was bombed again on 29 December 1944, during the German Ardennes offensive, and at the end of January 1945. On 14 and 15 October 1944 an American bomb had struck a chamber holding the demolition charges of the Mülheim bridge at Cologne and destroyed that bridge. Hitler responded by requiring that charges be set only when the enemy had come within a specified distance, eight kilometres in the order that governed the Ludendorff Bridge, and be fired only on written orders; he had those held responsible for the loss of the Mülheim bridge court-martialled. Six hundred kilograms of TNT had been brought up from Darmstadt after the Allied landings in Normandy, but that explosive was used elsewhere by the Wehrmacht and substitutes had to be found. By 7 March 1945 the charges on the Ludendorff Bridge had been taken off and were stored nearby.

About 5,100 people lived in Remagen in March 1945, and Allied bombing had destroyed more than half of Erpel's buildings, among them everything standing between the village marketplace and the bridge. As Army Group B under Field Marshal Walter Model fell back to the right bank of the Rhine in 1945, the Wehrmacht command intended every Rhine bridge to be blown, and the Germans had systematically destroyed the others ahead of the Allied attack, leaving this one of very few crossings still standing.

The German combat commandant at Remagen, Hauptmann Wilhelm Bratge, wanted the demolition carried out as early as possible; on the morning of 7 March he had only thirty-six soldiers at the bridge. Command had passed during the night to Major Hans Scheller, adjutant of the LXVII Army Corps under General Otto Hitzfeld, and Bratge learned of the change only at 11:00 that morning; the transfer caused confusion on the German side. Scheller wanted to hold the bridge open as long as he could so that as many German soldiers as possible could cross with their heavy equipment, some tanks and artillery pieces among it. Part of the civilian population took shelter in the railway tunnel that adjoins the bridge on the right bank. The bridge officer responsible, Hauptmann Friesenhahn, asked for 600 kilograms of engineer explosive; at 11:00 he received 300 kilograms of Donarit, a considerably weaker industrial explosive of the kind used in mining and not the Ecrasit that had been planned. Troops of the 1st US Army, midway through Operation Lumberjack, were by then pushing past Remagen to north and south, reckoning that the bridge would be blown at any moment.

At 13:00 a small vanguard of the 9th US Armored Division, led by the 22-year-old 2nd Lieutenant Karl H. Timmermann, reached the bridge and found it entirely intact. Timmermann informed his commander, General William M. Hoge, that it was serviceable, and Hoge ordered an immediate attack to take it. The American assault began at 13:40. A first German firing set off part of the charges and tore a crater ten metres wide in the ramp on the left bank. At 15:40, on Scheller's order, the Germans attempted the demolition proper: the bridge lifted briefly out of its bearings and settled back into them, damaged but standing, the weak civilian-grade explosive having failed to bring it down. Timmermann and twelve other soldiers were later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for the capture. Three soldiers ran out onto the structure to cut the demolition cables, at least one of them under machine-gun fire, and Allied engineers removed the remaining charges by hand at the risk of their lives.

Within twenty-four hours 8,000 soldiers crossed the Rhine eastward. Eisenhower ordered Omar N. Bradley, commanding the 12th US Army Group, to put as many divisions as possible onto the far bank even if that cut across the original plans, and is said to have exclaimed that the bridge was worth its weight in gold. The capture came two weeks before Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's planned Operation Plunder, and the bridgehead on the eastern side allowed the American forces to envelop the industrial Ruhr. Eighteen Allied regiments crossed between 7 March and the collapse on 17 March; six divisions went over the damaged structure before it was closed for repairs a few days after the capture, and American engineers set about repairing the weakened structure. The bridge and the pontoon bridges thrown across beside it carried a bridgehead of six divisions, some 125,000 troops with tanks, artillery pieces and lorries.

On 8 and 9 March 1945 Wehrmacht troops fired about 3,000 shells at the bridge without hitting it, and a counter-attack by the LXVII Army Corps on 10 March was too weak to succeed. Combat swimmers were then sent to fix charges to the river piers below the waterline, but powerful searchlights picked them up in time. From 8 to 12 March the Luftwaffe attempted without success to bring the bridge down by bombing; on 12 March, the height of the air battle, the Americans shot down twenty-six aircraft and damaged nine more out of ninety-one attacking, and in these attacks the Germans used Arado Ar 234 jet bombers of the III Gruppe of Kampfgeschwader 76 for the first time. A Karl mortar of 540 millimetre calibre was brought up, missed its target as well, and had to cease fire with technical trouble. Between 11 and 17 March the SS-Werferabteilung 500 fired eleven V2 rockets at the bridgehead from a position north of Hellendoorn in the German-occupied Netherlands. One struck a house about 270 metres east of the bridge and shook it noticeably, killing three American soldiers and wounding fifteen; another hit the village of Oedingen, seven kilometres away, destroyed several houses and killed six civilians, though a number of those buried were brought alive out of the rubble.

The badly damaged bridge collapsed on 17 March 1945, ten days after its capture. Overloading is given as the cause, and the collapse is also put down to the cumulative effect of the attempted demolition, the fighting since and the weight of Allied use. Accounts of the toll differ: twenty-eight American army engineers killed by some counts and thirty-two by others, with sixty-three injured in most tallies and ninety-three in another. Of the dead, only ten bodies were recovered on one account, and eighteen of the men were listed as missing and presumed drowned in the swift current of the river. The two river piers were left standing.

On 9 March 1945 Hitler set up the Flying Court Martial West. Under the presidency of Generalleutnant Rudolf Huebner it sentenced five officers to death on 13 and 14 March 1945 on charges of cowardice and dereliction of duty, and four of them, Major Scheller among them, were shot in the Westerwald immediately after sentence was pronounced, two at Rimbach and two at Oberirsen; they were buried at the war cemetery at Birnbach. Hauptmann Bratge, also sentenced to death, survived because he was in American captivity. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was replaced as commander-in-chief west by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who had the sentence made known across the Wehrmacht in a daily order. On a criminal complaint by Scheller's widow, Lisel Scheller-Gottschalk, the Koblenz public prosecutor later investigated the members of the court but dropped the proceedings in 1951 for want of proof of guilt. She then pressed for the sentence against her husband to be set aside and obtained his full legal rehabilitation: in a retrial before the Landshut regional court he was acquitted in February 1967.

The bridge was never rebuilt. The Deutsche Bundesbahn considered restoring it after the war and had a cost forecast drawn up in 1960, but dropped the idea once the left-bank and right-bank Rhine lines had been electrified by May 1962; the approach tracks at Remagen and Erpel, kept clear until then, were later abandoned, the crossing not being judged important enough to justify the work. Part of the land taken up by the approach spurs is now an industrial estate on the western bank and a park on the eastern. The river piers were lifted out of the riverbed in the summer of 1976 because they obstructed and endangered Rhine shipping. What survives is the bridge towers on both banks and parts of the approach ramp, which with the Erpel railway tunnel are protected monuments.

A peace museum has occupied the towers on the Remagen side since 7 March 1980, covering the bridge's history and themes of war and peace. Its initiator was Remagen's long-serving mayor Hans Peter Kürten, who on 7 March 1978 first sold small stones broken from the piers removed two years earlier; the proceeds, with photographs and original documents, allowed him to set the museum up. The Deutsche Bundesbahn sold the portal on the right bank at Erpel to the parish for a symbolic price in March 1988, and it is used today for cultural events; in September 2012 the Erpel cultural society Ad Erpelle bought the former railway tunnel behind it from Deutsche Bahn for a symbolic euro, to keep it publicly accessible and in cultural use; a theatre and concert space had been made inside that tunnel, where the play Die Brücke was first performed in October 2006. In July 2015 the Erpel portal reverted to the federal railway assets agency through the rescission of the 1988 sale, and in May 2018 it was offered for sale again; three bids came in, though its poor condition and restoration costs of about 1.4 million euros made a sale look difficult. A local poll in 2020 found 91 per cent in favour of rebuilding the crossing, there being no bridge over the river for 44 kilometres and few ferries, and plans were taken up in 2022 for a suspension bridge between the towers for pedestrians and cyclists. Conservation work on the listed towers, put off for years, began in July 2026 as part of the general refurbishment of the right-bank railway line and is due to finish by the end of 2026.