The Dortmund-Ems Canal is one of Germany's strategic arteries, connecting the inland industry of the Ruhr to the North Sea ports. At Ladbergen the canal passes over the small Mühlenbach stream on a pair of aqueducts. During the Second World War those aqueducts became a target the Allies returned to obsessively, knowing that breaching them would drain the canal and stop barge traffic carrying coal, steel, U-boat components, and finished weapons. The Germans understood the threat. They installed two heavy 105mm flak batteries at Ladbergen - the kind of weapon usually reserved for defending major cities - and ringed the canal with lighter anti-aircraft guns. The defenses worked, for a while. Multiple raids failed. Then, on the night of 23-24 September 1944, Avro Lancaster bombers of No. 617 Squadron RAF - the famous Dambusters - returned with the new Tallboy bombs designed by Barnes Wallis. The Tallboys breached the canal banks. Traffic stopped for weeks. The shrapnel and the misses fell on the village.

For most of its history Ladbergen was a poor village on sandy soil with too many children. After the war it became something stranger: an energy producer disproportionate to its population. In 2005 a wind farm of three REpower MM82 turbines went up on the outskirts, each rotor sweeping more than five thousand square meters. The following year two anaerobic digestion plants joined them, fermenting agricultural waste into methane. Then in 2007 a wood-fired combined heat and power gasification plant opened at the canal harbor, producing 50 million kWh of electricity and another 60 million kWh of heat annually - enough power for 15,000 households, several times what Ladbergen itself consumes. The 6,400-person village now mathematically generates more energy than it uses. The excess feeds the nearby Airport Park at Münster Osnabrück.

Of the families who did not emigrate, many carried surnames that appeared, recurred, and were eventually unique to Ladbergen itself: Gehde, Rahmeier, Schoppenhorst, Wibbeler, Wiethaupt, Wiethölter. These were not aristocratic lineages. They were the names of small farmers and millers and craftsmen who, generation after generation, married each other within the same handful of villages. The local dialect they spoke, called Ladbergen Platt, is a variant of Low German that until the 1930s was the dominant tongue in the village. A 2009 survey found just over 700 people - 11 percent of the population - still able to speak it, almost all over seventy years old. When that generation goes, Ladbergen Platt goes with them, but the names will probably linger in the phone book a while longer.

In 1246, representatives of Münster, Osnabrück, Minden, and Herford met in Ladbergen and founded the Ladberger Marktbund - the Ladbergen Market Federation - one of the early precursors of the Hanseatic League and the broader patterns of Westphalian commercial cooperation that would shape northern German trade for centuries. The village was a meeting point: situated almost exactly halfway between Münster and Osnabrück, easily reached from Minden and Herford, central enough to host neutral negotiations. Eight centuries later Ladbergen's neighbors Lengerich and Lienen are twinned with Wapakoneta and Saint Marys, Ohio - Wapakoneta being, by another coincidence, Neil Armstrong's hometown. For New Knoxville's sesquicentennial in 1986, about a hundred Ladbergen residents made the trip across the Atlantic that their ancestors had made one-way in the previous century.