Crumense Having already bought the then villages of
Zehlendorf,
Schlachtensee and Nikolassee in 1242, the monks of the influential
Cistercian Lehnin Abbey sought nine years later to expand their estate further north into
Teltow. In 1251, they bought the village of Crumense by the Krumme Lanke for one hundred and fifty marks from the
Ascanian Margraves Johann I and Otto III, who ruled the area together. As the village is not recorded in the Land Book of
Charles IV of 1375, it is very likely that the village was
abandoned soon after the purchase.Excavations in the abandoned site uncovered remnants of
Slavic pottery, it is thought the settlement was originally a Slavonic foundation.
Crumense in
Middle Low German indicates a site by a crooked lake, meaning the village was named after the lake. There are references to the lake itself in documents from 1543 and 1591, in which it is referred to as the
Krummensee.
SS colony Between 1938 and 1940, the
GAGFAH property company built an
SS colony by the Krumme Lanke. The firm worked in co-operation with the Office for Race and Settlement to create what
Reichsführer of the SS Heinrich Himmler called "a closed community for the officers of the SS." It is now a sought-after neighborhood in the German capital. Since 1945, almost all of the streets have been renamed:
Sigstraße was renamed
Bürstadter Weg (after
the town in southern
Hesse);
Treuepfad became
Alsbacher Weg (the name of
several places in Germany); and
Ahnenzeile became
Jugenheimer Weg (after
Jugenheim in Rheinhessen). The name of one street,
Im Kinderland (
In the land of children) remained. The name was suggested by the wife of an SS officer, on the grounds that "the men, who represent the racial elite of the German people, pass on their high-quality genetic material to a large number of genetically wealthy offspring." ==Music==