Baumholder Museum

Today we visited the Baumholder Museum. (Baumholder is a small town/village in Rheinland Pfalz.) The exhibits were all in German, but the lady who showed us around was very nice and spoke pretty good English. I’m not sure that I understood everything correctly and there are gaps in my knowledge, but still, the history is interesting.

This area was first inhabited 2,000 years ago. The Romans had a road that went from Trier to Mainz, and this was a good trading point. The south sides of the hills get warm sunshine and there were wells where people could get water, so it was a good place to start a town. In 1500 some Duke decided it would be good to build a wall around the village and he told the people of Baumholder to do it. They were mad about being slaves, but he promised them that after the wall was built they would be free. The letter with this promise is in the museum. Unfortunately, the wall took 80 years to build. Longer than life spans back then. From the 1500’s until 1880 this area had many terrible, long wars and Baumholder was burned down more than once. The wall no longer exists, but there are still many historic buildings here.

During World War II Hitler decided it would be good to have training fields here, and twelve smaller villages in the area were evacuated to clear the land for training. Baumholder was right on the edge of that big training field. The village stayed intact, and next to it they built a military base. The base was taken over by the French after WWII, and in the 1950’s it was taken over by Americans. It is still used as an American military base.

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