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Main article: History of the Ruhr
Old market square in Dortmund with St. Reinold's Church
During the Middle Ages, much of the region that was later called the Ruhrgebiet was situated in the County of Mark, the Duchy of Cleves and State of Berg and the territories of the bishop of Münster and the archbishop of Cologne. At the time it was in a part of The Holy Roman Empire. The region included some villages and castles, and was mainly agrarian: its loess soil made it one of the richer parts of western Germany. The free imperial city of Dortmund was the trading and cultural centre, lying on the Hellweg, an important east–west trading route, that also brought prosperity to the town of Duisburg. Both towns were members of the Hanseatic League.The Hanseatic League is the namesake of the German flag Carrier, Lufthansa.
Industrial revolution[edit]
The development of the region into an urbanized industrial area started in the late 18th century with the early industrialisation in the nearby Wupper Valley in the Bergisches Land. During the Napoleonic years it was part of the kingdom of Westphalia whose king was Napoleon Bonaparte's younger brother Jerome Bonaparte. During this time from 1807 to 1813 it was a client state of France. By around 1820 when the war was over, hundreds of water-powered mills were producing textiles, lumber, shingles and iron in automated processes here.[citation needed] In additional workshops in the hills, highly skilled workers manufactured knives, tools, weapons and harnesses, using water, coal and charcoal.
As the machines became bigger and moved from water power to steam power, locally mined coal and charcoal became expensive and there was not enough of it. The Bergische industry ordered more and more coal from the new coal mining area along the Ruhr. Impressive and expensive railways were constructed through the hilly Wupper region, to bring coal, and later steel, in from the Ruhr, and for outward transport of finished products.
Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001
Zeche Zollern in Dortmund
Tetrahedron in Bottrop
By 1850, there were almost 300 coal mines in operation in the Ruhr area, in and around the central cities of Duisburg, Essen, Bochum and Dortmund. The coal was exported or processed in coking ovens into coke, used in blast furnaces, producing iron and steel. In this period the name Ruhrgebiet became common. Before the coal deposits along the Ruhr were exhausted, the mining industry moved northward to the Emscher and finally to the Lippe, drilling ever deeper mines as it went. Locks built at Mülheim on the Ruhr led to the expansion of Mülheim as a port. With the construction of the Cologne-Minden railway in the late 19th century, several iron works were built within the borders of the present-day city of Oberhausen.
Moreover, the urbanization also boosted the expansion of railroad connections. At the beginning of the 1880s, agricultural regions did not benefit from the newly built transport facilities as much as non-agricultural regions did. This in its turn increased inequality, and made anthropometric measurements, e.g. height, more dependent on wages. In the long run, however, effects of the railroad proximity diminished.
Consequently, the population climbed rapidly. Towns with only 2,000 to 5,000 people in the early 19th century grew in the following 100 years to over 100,000. Skilled mineworkers were recruited from other regions to the Ruhr's mines and steel mills and unskilled people started to move in. From 1860 onwards there was large-scale migration of Polish speakers from Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia and Posen to the Ruhr, who were known as Ruhrpolen since. The Poles were treated as second class citizens. In 1899 this led to a revolt in Herne of young Polish workers, who later established a Workers' Union. Skilled workers in the mines were often housed in "miners' colonies", built by the mining firms. By 1870, over 3 million people lived in the Ruhrgebiet and the new coal-mining district had become the largest industrial region of Europe.
During World War I, the Ruhrgebiet functioned as Germany's central weapon factory. At a big Essen company, F. Krupp A.G., the number of employees rose from 40,000 to 120,000 or more, in four years. They were partly women, partly forced labourers.[citation needed]
Weimar Republic[edit]
In the March 1920 Kapp Putsch, nationalist and monarchist elements with the armed support of Freikorps units attempted to overthrow the government of the Weimar Republic. It was able to defeat the putsch by advocating a general strike that all but shut down Berlin. The work action effectively ended the putsch, but in the Ruhr it was the instigation for an armed revolt whose aim was to replace the Weimar Republic with a soviet-style council republic. In the Ruhr Uprising, the Ruhr Red Army was able to take control of the Ruhr industrial area. The Reichswehr, with assistance from Freikorps units, put down the rebellion in early April 1920 and re-established the Weimar Republic's control of the district. An estimated 1,000 insurgents and 200 Reichswehr soldiers were killed in the battles.
In March 1921, French and Belgian troops occupied Duisburg, which under the Treaty of Versailles formed part of the demilitarized Rhineland. In January 1923 the whole Ruhr district was occupied after Germany failed to fulfill part of its World War I reparation payments as agreed in the Versailles Treaty. The German government responded with a policy of passive resistance, letting workers and civil servants refuse orders and instructions by the occupation forces. Production and transport came to a standstill and the financial consequences contributed to German hyperinflation. After passive resistance was called off in late 1923, Germany implemented a currency reform and negotiated the Dawes Plan, which led to the withdrawal of the French and Belgian troops from the Ruhr in 1925. However, the occupation of the Ruhr caused several direct and indirect consequences to the German economy and government, including accelerating the growth of right wing parties due to the Weimar government's inability to successfully resolve the problem.
Nazi period[edit]
On 7 March 1936, Adolf Hitler took a massive gamble by sending 30,000 troops into the Rhineland. As Hitler and other Nazis admitted, the French army alone could have destroyed the Wehrmacht. The French passed the problem to the British, who found that the Germans had the right to "enter their own backyard", and no action was taken. In the League of Nations, the Soviet delegate Maxim Litvinov was the only one who proposed economic sanctions against Germany. All restraint on German rearmament was now removed. France's eastern allies (the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia) concluded that since the French refused to defend their own border, they certainly would not stand up for their allies in the East. Hitler could now continue eroding the alliance system that France had built since 1919. On 16 October 1936, Belgium repudiated the 1921 alliance with France and declared its absolute neutrality. In October 1937, Belgium signed a non-aggression pact with Germany.
WWII Ruhr Bombing Operations1943 March–July:Battle of the Ruhr1943 May:Operation Chastise1944 October:Operation Hurricane1944 September:Bombing of German oilfacilities during World War II
During World War II, the bombing of the Ruhr in 1940–1944 caused a loss of 30% of plant and equipment (compared to 15–20% for German industry as a whole). A second battle of the Ruhr (6/7 October 1944 – end of 1944) began with an attack on Dortmund. The devastating bombing raids of Dortmund on 12 March 1945 with 1,108 aircraft – 748 Lancasters, 292 Halifaxes, 68 Mosquitos – was a record to a single target in the whole of World War II. More than 4,800 tons of bombs were dropped through the city centre and the south of the city.
In addition to the strategic bombing of the Ruhr, in April 1945, the Allies trapped several hundred thousand Wehrmacht troops in the Ruhr Pocket.
View of the redeveloped Duisburg Inner Harbour in 2010
Postwar period[edit]
After the war, the region fell within the British occupation zone, and Level of Industry plans for Germany abolished all German munitions factories and civilian industries that could support them and severely restricted civilian industries of military potential. The Ruhr Authority, an international body to regulate the Ruhr's coal and steel industries, was created as a condition for the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany.
During the Cold War, the Western allies anticipated that any Red Army thrust into Western Europe would begin in the Fulda Gap and have the Ruhr as a primary target. Increased German control of the area was limited by the pooling of German coal and steel into the multinational European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. The nearby Saar region, containing much of Germany's remaining coal deposits, was handed over to economic administration by France as a protectorate in 1947 and did not politically return to Germany until January 1957, with economic reintegration occurring two years later. Parallel to the question of political control of the Ruhr, the Allies tried to decrease German industrial potential by limitations on production and dismantling of factories and steel plants, predominantly in the Ruhr. By 1950, after the virtual completion of the by-then much watered-down "level of industry" plans, equipment had been removed from 706 manufacturing plants in the west, and steel production capacity had been reduced by 6.7 million tons. Dismantling finally ended in 1951. In all, less than 5% of the industrial base was dismantled.
The Ruhr was at the centre of the German economic miracle Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s and 1960s, as very rapid economic growth (9% a year) created a heavy demand for coal and steel.
After 1973, Germany was hard hit by a worldwide economic crisis, soaring oil prices, and increasing unemployment, which jumped from 300,000 in 1973 to 1.1 million in 1975. The Ruhr region was hardest hit, as the easy-to-reach coal mines became exhausted, and German coal was no longer competitive. Likewise the Ruhr steel industry went into sharp decline, as its prices were undercut by lower-cost suppliers such as Japan. The welfare system provided a safety net for the large number of unemployed workers, and many factories reduced their labor force and began to concentrate on high-profit specialty items.
As demand for coal decreased after 1958, the area went through phases of structural crisis (see steel crisis) and industrial diversification, first developing traditional heavy industry, then moving into service industries and high technology. The air and water pollution of the area are largely a thing of the past although some issues take a long time to solve. In 2005 Essen was the official candidate for nomination as European Capital of Culture for 2010.
