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11  Stones  Building the Bridge, Its First Purpose and the Sale of Bridge Stones

The architect of the 325-meter-long bridge was Karl Wiener.  Kaiser William II bestowed upon it the name of the General Erich Ludendorff.  But the bridge, which had been built for crossing the Rhine for reasons of war, was not finished until 1918 – too late to fulfill those military purposes. German soldiers returning from the war were among the first to cross the bridge.

When in the summer of 1977 the bridge piers were retrieved from out of the Rhine, Mayor Hans Peter Kürten got the idea of selling the bridge stones with a certificate as souvenirs in order to finance a documentation of the events surrounding the Bridge at Remagen with these sales.  On March 7^th, 1980, he was already able to open the Peace Museum, which counted 514,476 visitors up to the time of its remodeling in 2002.