Gedenkstein Mariechen Lehmkuhl

Not far from the memorial stone, Mariechen Lehmkuhl, a 22-year-old farmer's daughter from Ahausen, was fatally shot by a revolver bullet on the evening of September 2, 1924. Georg Otto, a farmer by profession and son of Hemelingen bell founder Ferdinand Otto, had fired the shot just a few hundred meters away from his victim's parents' house. The farmhand Friedrich Röpke, who was working on the Lehmkuhls' farm on the Weser dyke in Ahaus and was in the immediate vicinity, heard the bang and saw Mariechen fall to the ground. While he rushed to the scene, distraught and panicked, a second shot rang out: The perpetrator had tried to take his own life. He was seriously injured and taken to a hospital in Bremen. "If he escaped with his life," reported the Achimer Kreisblatt two days later, "he will probably lose his eyesight, as the bullet destroyed his optic nerves". Georg Otto only survived the suicide attempt for two months and died as a result on October 30, 1924 - at the age of 24.

The murder of Mariechen Lehmkuhl was an act of desperation out of spurned love. Contemporary witnesses and reporters in local newspapers from Syke to Achim agree on this. For Fritz and Adeline Lehmkuhl, the victim's parents, a world collapsed. They had lost their only child, Mariechen, and the heiress of their stately marsh farm. As a memorial and reminder, they had the memorial stone, an erratic boulder, erected on the spot that was their daughter's doom. "Our only beloved child Mariechen died here at the hands of a murderer on September 2, 1924 at the age of 23," reads the simple inscription, which also refers to a well-known biblical quote from the Apostle Paul's 1st letter to the Corinthians: "Love never ends ..."

The memorial stone was restored in 2004 and re-erected near its original location.