The first written mention of Doetinchem comes from a Carolingian document of 838, which calls it villa Duetinghem - a small settlement around a church. By 887 it was a Deutinkem, a fortress with a church, gifted to the Bishop of Utrecht. The spelling kept slipping: Duttichem, Duichingen, Deutekom. The place itself sat above the Oude IJssel, the Old IJssel, on a slight rise above the floodplain in a region called the Achterhoek - literally the back corner - the rural east of the Netherlands that the famous parts of the country tend to forget about. By 1236 the town had earned city rights from Count Otto II of Gelre and Zutphen, in exchange for taxes and soldiers. The town council promptly wrote its own legal code, the Keurboek van Doetinchem, with the kind of severe punishments that medieval town councils believed kept walls standing.

By 1226 the defenses had been raised by another meter. Four city gates - the Hamburgerpoort built in 1302, the Waterpoort, the Gruitpoort, the Hezenpoort - replaced the original timber barriers. A moat was dug, a rampart raised in front of the wall, and a windmill called the Walmolen was eventually built on top of the rampart. None of it was quite enough. Doetinchem was besieged repeatedly during the Eighty Years War and captured twice. In 1672 - the Rampjaar that began with the French crossing at Tolhuis just down the road - the walls were finally torn down as militarily useless. The Walmolen still stands. The bottom of it now houses the town's tourist office, which is a quietly Dutch way to commemorate seven hundred years of defense: turn the last fortification into the welcome desk.

Long before war came in earnest, Doetinchem suffered the usual catastrophes of a medieval European town with admirable consistency. In 1527 a great fire destroyed most of the city, including the archives - which is why earlier dates in Doetinchem's history are slightly slippery. In 1580 plague swept the town and killed most of the inhabitants. Floods came and went with the Oude IJssel. By the time the twentieth century arrived, Doetinchem had survived enough that it might have hoped to be left alone. The First World War, with the Netherlands neutral, passed it by with nothing more than a few border guards posted toward the German line. The Second World War, until almost the end, treated it gently. Then came March 1945.

What Karel Berkhuysen's 2018 research surfaced was that the Germans had converted a school in Doetinchem into a research facility working on nuclear fission. The information found its way to the Allies. In late March and April 1945, with the war days from ending in the Netherlands, the center of Doetinchem was largely destroyed by Allied bombing. Whether the raids were specifically aimed at the schoolhouse facility, at German defenses, or at both has never been fully clarified, and the people of Doetinchem are entitled to argue about it forever. St. Catherine's Church, the Catharinakerk, was nearly leveled - it took until 1963 to rebuild. The Calgary Highlanders liberated the town shortly afterward, after a brief fight. The bombing was the last great event in Doetinchem's history. Recovery was the next one.

The Achterhoek has a reputation, in the Netherlands, for being quiet, agricultural, and slightly out of step with the rest of the country - which celebrates Carnival mostly in the Catholic south but somehow also celebrates it, unusually, here in the east. Doetinchem grew steadily after the war. Philips opened a factory. New neighborhoods like Dichteren were built. By the early 2000s the town had outgrown its old rivals Doesburg, Winterswijk, and Zutphen to become the largest in the Achterhoek. De Graafschap - The County - is the local professional football team and a regional point of pride, playing in blue and white at an all-seater stadium. Three windmills still grind in or near the town: the Walmolen on the old rampart, Aurora over in Dichteren, and the Benninkmolen to the east. Every August around fifteen thousand people sign up for the four-day marathon that loops out through the Achterhoek and back, on foot, past fields and old farms and the unhurried small towns that the rest of the Netherlands largely forgets exists.