350 years ago he was the king of the forests, a savage ruler from whom no one was safe. The wolf, nobody's subject and everyone's enemy, ruled the forests in eastern Germany as he wanted. But man was his competitor. he chased him and killed him wherever he met him. An unequal fight that the wolf lost 300 years ago: Under the government of Count Jost-Christian zu Stolberg-Roßla, the last wolf was killed in the vast forest areas south of the Harz Mountains in 1724,
An act of violence that probably caused remorse 100 years later. If you hike today into the woods through the area today, you will come across a mark of repentance turned into stone in a remote area near the gypsum karst landscape of Questenberg. A memorial for the very last wolf, erected by the children of his murderers in a wooded area called "Helga-Schröder-Wald". To the right and left of the sandstone monument with the lying animal are two large trees that provide shade for the wolf. A nearby table invites you to have a picnic, but after all the decades the statue only looks like new because it was only repaired some time ago.
Before that, the ravages of time had worn down the ears, for many years there were two deep holes in the wolf's head, and the snout had almost completely disappeared. The body was covered with dirt and moss. The wolf memorial in Schwiederschwende was barely recognizable 200 years after its construction, before the stonemason Oliver Matz invested 80 hours in the reconstruction - without a template, because of course there were no photos of the original.
Now the memorial is back, it is not too far away from the memorial stone for the last bear killed here, which was hunted around 1786 in the forest of the Ramberg massif between the Viktorshöhe and the Bremen pond next to the Bärweg forest path.
The bear has not returned to its former territory to this day, but the wolf, which the inhabitants of the surrounding villages had once exterminated because it was considered a land nuisance, has. In Saxony-Anhalt there are currently 12 wolf packs and one pair of wolves, although not yet in the southern Harz.
But the more undisturbed the wolf can reproduce, the sooner it will return to where its end was once celebrated. And if he is back someday it will be his ultimataly triumph over his murderers.
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