Totenberg-Kapelle St. Peter

The Totenberg-Kapelle St. Peter stands high on the Totenberg above Heidenheim an der Brenz. The hill counts as the oldest settlement area from which the village grew, and an Alamanni community with its own burial ground occupied the southern slope by the fifth century. Around the year 1000 the Palatinate counts raised the castle Moropolis on the summit, a name that probably fed into Heidenheim's own. Traces of old fortifications across the hill mark where villagers once took refuge. The cemetery around the chapel is the town's oldest burial ground, and its use reaches from the Roman period, around AD 85 to 260, to the present day.

The first church here was timber, raised in the fifth and sixth centuries for the Alamanni and Franks settling the area. By the eighth century a stone building had taken its place. Written records first mention the church in 1216, and by 1323 it served as a parish church. That status ended in the mid-fifteenth century, when the village declined and the title passed to St. Nicholas or Michael's Church. Renovations followed over the centuries, with major campaigns in 1577, 1727 to 1728, 1847 and 1969. Work in 1933 uncovered a Romanesque portal on the south side and a Gothic window niche in the choir. A Roman votive stone dedicated to Jupiter came to light at the same time.

Inside you find four memorial plaques from the sixteenth century and a child's gravestone from 1815. Since 1986 the chapel has hosted the annual Volkstrauertag service, remembering the fallen and missing of both world wars. Thirty-six bronze plaques list the names of those who perished or went missing. At the back of the altar, a plaque records a hunting accident of 1562, a measure of how much the Heidenheim forest once mattered.