Qualla: Gladbeck

Gladbeck: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roy Zuo, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is the Gladbeck on the map - a 75,000-person town in the district of Recklinghausen, knotted into the northern Ruhr conurbation, surrounded by Bottrop and Gelsenkirchen and Dorsten. And then there is the Gladbeck that lives in German collective memory: the name attached to one of the most disturbing crime stories in the history of the Federal Republic, a 54-hour hostage crisis in August 1988 that ended in three deaths and a scandal about journalism that is still taught in German media-ethics seminars today. The town would like to be known for other things. It has, after all, been here in some form since at least the year 1020.

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Image: Roy Zuo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gladbeck: A Village Around a Cathedral

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 4.0. Archaeological finds put humans in this corner of the Emscher valley as early as 2000 BC. The settlement first appears in the documentary record in 1020, when it was called Gladbeki - a small village of perhaps 300 inhabitants arranged around the church of St. Lamberti. For more ...

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Image: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gladbeck: The Coal Boom

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Globe-trotter, CC BY-SA 3.0. Coal was found in the 1870s. The first coal was lifted out of Gladbeck in 1878, and that changed everything. People poured in to work the mines - from neighboring Westphalia, from the Rhine Province, from the eastern reaches of Prussia, many of them ethnic Poles whose native lang...

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Image: Globe-trotter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gladbeck: The 54 Hours of August 1988

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ziko, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 16 August 1988, two career criminals - Hans-Juergen Roesner and Dieter Degowski - robbed a Deutsche Bank branch in Gladbeck and took two of the bank employees hostage. What followed over the next two days was unlike any criminal event West Germany had seen. The hostage-takers,...

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Image: Ziko | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gladbeck: The Press Scandal

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Björn S..., CC BY-SA 2.0. What made Gladbeck a watchword in German journalism was not only the crime itself but the press behavior around it. Reporters from major German outlets gave the hostage-takers live interviews while the crisis was in progress. A journalist climbed into the hijacked car for a sit-d...

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Image: Björn S... | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gladbeck: What Stays

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vogelfreir, CC BY-SA 4.0. Gladbeck has had to keep being a town with all of that in its history. The moated Wittringen Castle still stands in its park, the same fortress the medieval knights built, now housing the town museum with its bison skeleton, its Roman coins, its Bronze Age cemetery finds, and its...

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Image: Vogelfreir | CC BY-SA 4.0