Qualla: Stadtallendorf

Stadtallendorf: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas Trepte, CC BY-SA 2.5. Three tonnes of TNT came out of the ground here, and it was still capable of exploding. That was in the course of a cleanup that ran from 1991 to 2006, cost the state of Hesse 167 million euros, and removed 154 tonnes of contaminants from the soil and another 697 tonnes from a dump - one of the largest such operations Germany has undertaken, on a site of six square kilometres where people had been living for decades. In parts of the town the chemicals were in residential gardens. What was under Stadtallendorf, and what the town has spent thirty years working out how to live with, is a factory the Allies never found.

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Image: Andreas Trepte | CC BY-SA 2.5

Stadtallendorf: Works in the Woods

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hydro, CC BY-SA 4.0. Until 1960 the place was simply called Allendorf, a name shared with several other Hessian villages and worth nobody's attention. During the Second World War two armaments firms - WASAG, the Westphalian and Anhaltish Explosives company, and DAG - built separate large plants in th...

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Image: Hydro | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stadtallendorf: The Women of Münchmühle

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerold Rosenberg (talk) 19:03, 2 February 2016 (UTC), CC BY-SA 3.0. A plant that size needs labour, and by the later war years Germany was getting labour by taking it. Around a dozen camps stood in the country around Allendorf, holding German and foreign forced workers and prisoners of war. One of them was Münchmühle, a subcamp of Buchenwald, an...

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Image: Gerold Rosenberg (talk) 19:03, 2 February 2016 (UTC) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stadtallendorf: The Generals in the Stone Camp

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pazzee at de wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the war ended the Americans arrived and put the site to a different use. Steinlager Allendorf was a rough, improvised prison camp, and through it passed more than two hundred generals and staff officers of the German army, among them Franz Halder, who had run the army genera...

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Image: Pazzee at de wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stadtallendorf: The Town That Grew On Top

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas Trepte, CC BY-SA 2.5. Allendorf became Stadtallendorf in 1960 when it was granted city rights, and the new name settled the old confusion with the other Allendorfs. The civic arms kept a memento of it: alongside the striped Lion of Hesse and the six-spoked Wheel of Mainz - the town belonged to the Arc...

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Image: Andreas Trepte | CC BY-SA 2.5

Stadtallendorf: Ordinary Weather

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hydro, CC BY-SA 4.0. Stadtallendorf sits on the Upper Hesse Ridge, on the watershed between the Rhine and the Weser, about 18 kilometres east of Marburg, in gently rolling farm country that gives no hint of any of this. The villages amalgamated into it in the 1970s - Niederklein, Schweinsberg, Erksdo...

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Image: Hydro | CC BY-SA 4.0