From the history of Friesdorf

Friesdorf History

Here Friesdorf-Verlag collects reports, episodes and discoveries from the history of Friesdorf — researched from the sources and vividly told. They offer a foretaste of the work from which the publisher's books grow. On this page you will find English summaries; the full reports, with all sources, pictures and maps, are available in German.

Reports in this series

Cover: Kriminalität in Friesdorf 1816 – 2026 (Crime in Friesdorf)

Report 1 Crime in Friesdorf 1816 — 2026 ↓ To the summary

Cover: Der Bombenkrieg über Friesdorf 1941–1945 (The Bombing War over Friesdorf)

Report 2 The Bombing War over Friesdorf 1941 — 1945 ↓ To the summary

St Martin's procession in Friesdorf with the tower of St. Servatius

Report 3 St Martin in Friesdorf 1406 — 2026 ↓ To the summary

Report 1 · Summary

Crime in Friesdorf
1816 — 2026

Murderers, robbers, impostors and day labourers. A journey through the darkest hours of a Rhineland suburb.

A narrative account by Andreas Giersberg

On the night of 10 to 11 June 1923, two masked men held up the depot of the electric tramway — where the SWB bus depot at the Hochkreuz stands today — and escaped with the day's takings: fourteen and a half million marks. In the hyperinflation of 1923 that was worth barely 130 US dollars. One of the robbers, a smith from Hamminkeln on the Lower Rhine, was caught a month later. Only four weeks earlier a Friesdorf man named Schwingen had stabbed a French soldier of the occupying army to death in an inn in neighbouring Dottendorf.

From these two cases the report opens up a forgotten side of the village. Between 1880 and 1940 Friesdorf appeared in the crime columns of the Bonn newspapers almost every week. Four figures stand at the centre: the day labourer Max, who in 1888 threw his housemate into a manure pit and is Friesdorf's oldest documented offender; a confectioner from the Siegerland who in 1903 posed as a detective to take ten pfennigs from a six-year-old and got six weeks in prison; Schwingen, the only murderer of the period studied, whom the German police handed over to French military justice; and a family of masons who in 1904 ended up in court over a series of insults in the village inns. Further cases from the 1890s complete the picture of everyday crime in Wilhelmine Friesdorf.

Surprisingly, three streets — Annaberger Straße, Friesdorfer Straße and Servatiusstraße — have remained hotspots for more than a hundred years: burglaries in 1913 and in 2024/2026, industrial thefts in the inflation years and traffic offences today, an attempted break-in at the Herz-Jesu church in 1926 and attempted burglaries in apartment buildings in 2023 and 2025. Some forms of crime have vanished, such as poaching; new ones have appeared, such as e-bike theft and stolen bank data.

The second part follows the police: eight different police organisations in two hundred years, from the mounted Prussian gendarme to today's Bonn police, with their ranks, three formative episodes, a table comparing sentences — two months in prison for a broken leg, hardly more than the six weeks for a ten-pfennig fraud — and 47 police and administrative officials identified by name in the address books. The report concludes: Friesdorf is a good place, an entirely normal residential community with a surprisingly long criminal history.

Based on the digitised Bonn daily press (zeit.punkt NRW), address books and administrative reports. Read the full report in German →

Report 2 · Summary

The Bombing War over Friesdorf
1941 — 1945

A single bomb, 26 dead, a destroyed church — and an aerial photograph that begins to speak eighty years later.

A fact-based account by Andreas Giersberg

Friesdorf was not a military target — no armaments works, no railway junction, no barracks. Yet it lay beneath one of the routes on which British bomber formations flew from England up the Rhine valley. The first bombs fell in the autumn of 1941 “without causing great damage”, as the school chronicle notes; on the night of 6 April 1942 an aerial mine damaged houses at the Arndtruhe and left 80 people homeless.

The darkest hour came on the night of 16 to 17 April 1943. A single bomb killed 26 people in Klufterstraße, among them four pupils of the village school; one family alone lost seven members, and sixteen houses were destroyed. There had been no air-raid warning. The report reconstructs a well-founded explanation from RAF operational records, a logbook, eyewitness accounts and the fire brigade's records: that night the RAF attacked the Škoda works in Pilsen, 600 kilometres away, and missed. Lancaster W4783 “G-George” of No. 460 Squadron turned back with its full bomb load and dropped a 4,000-pound mine over a target the crew “believed” to be Koblenz — in fact it was already over Friesdorf. The aircraft survives today in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Four days later the Nazi regime staged the funeral as a propaganda event. The report lists the names of the 26 victims.

Life changed: tunnels were dug into the hillside, old brewery cellars became air-raid shelters, some built by Dutch forced labourers, and in the autumn of 1944 school lessons stopped altogether. On 21 December 1944 an air raid destroyed the neo-Gothic parish church of St. Servatius; only the tower remained, and the sexton and organist died inside. An aerial mine also badly damaged the medieval tower house, and in February 1945 the parish hall burned down.

A new source closes the report: three Allied reconnaissance photographs of 13 February 1945, analysed by computer in 2026. They make the rubble of the church measurable to the square metre and reveal hundreds of suspected bomb craters, which can be located on today's street map — in front gardens, car parks and on the way to school. On 8 March 1945 Bad Godesberg was handed over to US troops without a fight. The church was rebuilt from 1949; a memorial of 1965 in the church tower lists the names of the dead, and a cenotaph followed in 1968.

Based on the school and parish chronicles, the fire brigade's records, RAF Operational Record Books (The National Archives, Kew), the General-Anzeiger and eyewitness accounts. The aerial-photo analysis is not an official survey and does not replace an investigation for unexploded ordnance. Read the full report in German →

Report 3 · Summary

St Martin in Friesdorf
1406 — 2026

Rents paid in new wine and Martinmas bonfires, turnip lanterns and torch processions: six centuries of a Rhineland custom in one village.

A source-based account by Andreas Giersberg

St Martin's Day, 11 November, is one of the best-loved customs in the Rhineland: children walk through the dark streets with lanterns behind a rider dressed as St Martin, who once shared his cloak with a freezing beggar, to a large bonfire. The report traces this custom in Friesdorf from more than thirty newspaper pages, charters and song records.

The oldest Friesdorf evidence is not a song but a lease: in 1406 a Friesdorf couple undertook to pay Heisterbach Abbey “every year at Martinmas” a measure of fermenting new wine, 30 pence and two hens. For centuries Martinmas remained the day on which rents and leases fell due. Long before the lantern processions, young lads went from door to door collecting wood and straw, built a great bonfire on a hill and carried lanterns carved from turnips. Friesdorf lies in the heartland of these Martinmas fires between the Ahr, Bonn and the Sieg; in 1903 the custom was described as “particularly pronounced” here. In 1909 a Bonn headmaster recorded the Friesdorf begging song in the local dialect — “Holz oder Strüh, dat schleppe mer op de Hüh!” (wood or straw, we drag it up the hill).

The first organised procession took place in 1921. Around 1930 it was a grand occasion: home-made torches shaped like the church, the tower house or a zeppelin, drummers and fifers, a mighty bonfire on the sports ground and a sweet bun for every child the next morning. From 1930 the Ortsausschuss, the umbrella organisation of the village associations, helped to organise it. In 1933 St Martin lit all torches from the sanctuary lamp in the church, while at the fire the headmaster turned the festival into Nazi propaganda; the report of 1938 appeared two days after the November pogrom. In 1939 the procession was cancelled because of the blackout. It resumed in 1949, and in 1950 St Martin rode through Friesdorf as a bishop.

Today the Ortsausschuss Friesdorf 1929 e. V. organises the procession, the youth fire brigade guards the bonfire, and a raffle and donations from local firms pay for it. The report also tells of „Knüles“, a cake of grated potatoes baked in a cast-iron pot that is eaten in Friesdorf around St Martin's Day, of „Schnörzen“ — singing at doors for a small gift — and compares St Martin with Halloween. Since 27 March 2026 the St Martin tradition in the Rhineland has been listed in Germany's national inventory of intangible cultural heritage.

Based on newspapers of 1903–1950 (zeit.punkt NRW / ULB Bonn), the cartulary of Heisterbach Abbey, song collections, the Rheinisches Wörterbuch and current sources of the Ortsausschuss and the City of Bonn. The German report includes a map, a timeline, a small glossary and many historical pictures. Read the full report in German →

More reports to follow

Three reports in this series have been published. Further stories from Friesdorf's past will be added here over time — about farms and houses, clubs and inns, work and everyday life.

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