Qualla: Teufelsmoor https://qualla.com/teufelsmoor en-us © 2026 Bendyline Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:49:15 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/q/r/teufelsmoor-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Teufelsmoor https://qualla.com/teufelsmoor Teufelsmoor: Introduction https://qualla.com/teufelsmoor/ Photo credit CWitte at German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Den Eersten sien Dood, den Tweeten sien Noot, den Drüdden sien Broot. The first gets death, the second gets misery, the third gets bread. Settlers in the Teufelsmoor said it about their own farms, and it was not a proverb about patience - it was a forecast, and an accurate one. The first generation dug drainage ditches in saturated peat and died young in damp turf huts. The second stayed poor. Only the third, with luck, ate properly. That was the deal offered to farmhands and servant girls from the villages around Bremen in the middle of the eighteenth century: come out onto the bog, take a strip of it, and you will owe no taxes and serve in no army. Thousands took it. The landscape they cut into the wet ground is still legible from the air today.

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Image: CWitte at German Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/q/r/teufelsmoor-wp/u1qr-teufelsmoor-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Teufelsmoor: The Name Is a Mistranslation https://qualla.com/teufelsmoor/ Photo credit CWitte at German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Teufelsmoor looks like devil's moor and almost nobody who hears it resists the image. The name has nothing to do with the devil. It comes from doofes Moor in Low Saxon, where doof means barren, unfertile, dead - a flat description of ground that would not grow anything. The reaso...

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Image: CWitte at German Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/q/r/teufelsmoor-wp/u1qr-teufelsmoor-the-name-is-a-mistranslation.mp3 0:06 2 full Teufelsmoor: Findorff's Forty-Two Villages https://qualla.com/teufelsmoor/ Photo credit CWitte at German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The man who organised the colonisation was born in Lauenburg on the Elbe in February 1720 and died at Bremervörde in July 1792. Jürgen Christian Findorff started laying out moor settlements around 1751 and was formally appointed Moorkommissar by decree of King George III in Septe...

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Image: CWitte at German Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/q/r/teufelsmoor-wp/u1qr-teufelsmoor-findorffs-forty-two-villages.mp3 0:06 3 full Teufelsmoor: A Grid Cut Into a Bog https://qualla.com/teufelsmoor/ Photo credit CWitte at German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. What the colonists built was an engineered surface. Long straight drainage ditches were dug to dry the ground, and the main ones were sized to double as canals, so that the peat cut from the strips could be poled out by barge. Houses went up in lines along the embankments - the R...

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Image: CWitte at German Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/q/r/teufelsmoor-wp/u1qr-teufelsmoor-a-grid-cut-into-a-bog.mp3 0:06 4 full Teufelsmoor: Improvement https://qualla.com/teufelsmoor/ Photo credit CWitte at German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The twentieth century did more damage than the peat cutters ever managed, and it did it in the name of productivity. Dairy cattle spread across the drained ground from the late 1800s, and from the middle of the next century national and European subsidy programmes funded serious ...

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Image: CWitte at German Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/q/r/teufelsmoor-wp/u1qr-teufelsmoor-improvement.mp3 0:06 5 full Teufelsmoor: Putting the Water Back https://qualla.com/teufelsmoor/ Photo credit CWitte at German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The rethink came in the 1990s. Land is being taken out of use and deliberately reflooded, and an old extraction site inside the Teufelsmoor reserve was rewetted in 2017, though nobody involved pretends the original bog can be recovered - it no longer exists. Even the surviving st...

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Image: CWitte at German Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/q/r/teufelsmoor-wp/u1qr-teufelsmoor-putting-the-water-back.mp3 0:06 6 full