Qualla: Edersee Dam

Edersee Dam: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kaʁstn Disk/Cat, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. In a dry late summer the lake goes down and the villages come back. First the bridge, still spanning the old riverbed it was built for. Then walls, then street lines, then the outlines of Asel, Bringhausen and Berich, which have been under water since 1914 and are made of mud now. People walk out across the flats to find the graves of their great-grandparents. It is one of the strangest recurring events in German tourism and it is entirely the fault of a masonry wall 48 metres high standing across the valley at the northern edge of the Kellerwald - a wall that has been famous twice, once for what it drowned and once for what happened when somebody knocked a hole in it.

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Image: kaʁstn Disk/Cat | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Edersee Dam: What the Water Covered

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Danny S., CC BY-SA 3.0. The dam went up between 1908 and 1914 near the small town of Waldeck, and it is built the way big dams were built before concrete took over: a curved wall of masonry, 400 metres along the crest, six metres thick at the top and thirty-six at the base, holding back everything the R...

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Image: Danny S. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Edersee Dam: The Small Hours of 17 May 1943

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The Eder was one of the targets of Operation Chastise. Lancasters of No. 617 Squadron RAF flew that night against the great German water reservoirs carrying a weapon built for exactly this problem: a cylindrical bomb, spun backwards and released low so that it skipped across the ...

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Image: Unknown author | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Edersee Dam: Eight Thousand Cubic Metres a Second

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karl Alwin Hiller, CC BY 3.0. The reservoir emptied through that gap at eight thousand cubic metres per second into the valley below, and what came down was a wall of water six to eight metres high that was still recognisably a wave thirty kilometres downstream. It flattened whatever stood in the floodplain b...

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Image: Karl Alwin Hiller | CC BY 3.0

Edersee Dam: Rebuilt by Men Who Had No Choice

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karl Alwin Hiller, CC BY 3.0. The hole was closed within months, which was faster than anyone in London expected. It was done by forced labour, and the labourers were pulled off the Atlantic Wall - the coastal fortification programme in France - and moved east under the Organisation Todt, the Reich's construc...

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Image: Karl Alwin Hiller | CC BY 3.0

Edersee Dam: Third Largest, and Famous For It

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lars Jockel, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Edersee now holds 199.3 million cubic metres, which makes it the third largest reservoir in Germany. It still does the jobs it was built for: generating hydroelectricity, and releasing water in dry months to keep the Weser navigable far to the north. It is also, in summer, co...

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Image: Lars Jockel | CC BY-SA 3.0