Gälltofta
Gälltofta is a small village with a turbulent history behind the
calm surface. People settled here already during the Iron Age when
the nature here was quite different with thickly foliaged deciduous
wood. Gälltofta later became one of the villages, which was passed
by the “green road” from the province of Blekinge to
Lund. In the middle age the barn to the castle in Åhus, which
belonged to the archbishop in Lund, was situated in Gälltofta. It
served as economical administration buildings to the castle and as
a tax-collecting centre for the archbishop’s domains, which
around 1530 contained 270 farms and four mills. In 1452 the Swedish
king Karl Knutsson and his army burnt the village when they
attacked this Danish province.
In 1666 the Crown gave some farms in Gälltofta and Rinkaby to
colonel Gunter von Bielow who built a large mansion. He was,
however, a hard man and treated his tenant farmers harshly and soon
got called a peasant tormentor. His farms were however retaken by
the Crown in 1676 and all tenants were happy. The wars and careless
use of the trees in the area had diminished the woods and given
free space for the sandy soil to spread. The sand dunes from the
coast spread sand over the area and some farms had to be
discontinued and the buildings removed. To stop the sand flight new
trees were planted.
To defend Swedish neutrality during World War II a military
airfield was constructed here with hard made triangular runways of
670 m. Three hangars were built. Although situated in Gälltofta it
was called Rinkaby airfield as an earlier field close to that
village had been used already during the 1920-ies. F 10 Bulltofta
used the base for their Italian built J 20 fighter planes and also
for training of new pilots from F 5 Ljungbyhed. 19 foreign military
aircrafts made emergency landings on the field during the war.
After 1945 the field was only used for training purposes. In 1973
it became part of the new tanks training field for P 6. Later
engineering troops learnt and trained repairs of runways on the
abandon field.
To house the air force personnel barracks were built north of the
road opposite the hangars.
After the war in late 1945, 146 German military personnel of Baltic
origin were detented here to be transferred to the Soviet Union
after strong demands by Soviet authorities as prisoners of war. In
other camps like Rinkaby, about 2500 Germans and other nationals
who had fled the war were detented. The decision by the Swedish
government to surrender these soldiers was strongly criticised and
many of the detentees tried to commit suicide or injure themselves
to avoid extradition, all in vain. In 1994 the Swedish government
officially apologized for the decision.