Qualla: Alsdorf

Alsdorf: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Norbert Schnitzler, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 21 October 1930, an explosion in the Anna II coal mine killed two hundred seventy men and one woman, making it the second-worst mining disaster in German history. The bodies came out for days. The town the disaster gutted was Alsdorf, a place built almost entirely by coal - a network of company villages thrown together between 1860 and 1960 to house the workforce one mine company kept needing to expand. The Anna kept producing for another sixty-two years after the explosion. The Maria, the older mine four kilometers south in Hoengen, lasted only until 1962. When the last pit closed in 1992, Alsdorf had to invent itself again, and it did - quietly, without much help, by selling its location near three borders to whatever industry would buy.

Read more: Alsdorf on Qualla

Image: Norbert Schnitzler | CC BY-SA 3.0

Alsdorf: Older than the Coal

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ArthurMcGill, CC BY-SA 4.0. Alsdorf appears in writing for the first time in 1191, in a Catholic Church document, and was likely much older than that already. For most of its history the place was a knot of small farming settlements - Alsdorf itself, plus Bettendorf, Hoengen, Ofden, Schaufenberg, Warden, an...

Read more: Alsdorf on Qualla

Image: ArthurMcGill | CC BY-SA 4.0

Alsdorf: Coal Arrives

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ArthurMcGill, CC BY-SA 4.0. Coal production opened in Hoengen at the Maria Mine in 1849. The Anna mine in Alsdorf followed in 1853. The mining companies needed workers, more than the surrounding farmland could supply, so the companies built houses to attract them - Begau, Blumenrath, Broicher Siedlung, Busc...

Read more: Alsdorf on Qualla

Image: ArthurMcGill | CC BY-SA 4.0

Alsdorf: The Anna II Disaster

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lars Steffens, CC BY-SA 2.0. Coal mining is dangerous everywhere. In the Aachen coalfield, the seams ran deep, gassy, and prone to methane buildup. On 21 October 1930 something ignited in the Anna II shaft and the explosion ripped through the workings. Two hundred seventy men and one woman were killed in a s...

Read more: Alsdorf on Qualla

Image: Lars Steffens | CC BY-SA 2.0

Alsdorf: After the Pits

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ArthurMcGill, CC BY-SA 4.0. Maria closed in September 1962. Production at Anna continued through the German coal crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, kept open by subsidies and political will, but the economics finally won and the last shaft in Alsdorf closed in 1992. By that point the town faced the same problem...

Read more: Alsdorf on Qualla

Image: ArthurMcGill | CC BY-SA 4.0

Alsdorf: What the Town Remembers

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eschweiler ♀, Public domain. Alsdorf today has a zoo, an indoor arena, a cinema housed in an old mining-era water tower, and a civic center built as a musical hall where productions of Gaudi and Just One World were once staged. The Alsdorf Castle is a tourist sight. So is the Anna mine's preserved water towe...

Read more: Alsdorf on Qualla

Image: Eschweiler ♀ | Public domain