Qualla: Rheindahlen

Rheindahlen: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sascha Brück, CC BY-SA 3.0. Two hundred thousand years ago, something that may have been Homo heidelbergensis or possibly Neanderthal Man chipped a hand hammer out of stone in the clay soil of what is now the southern edge of Rheindahlen. The hammer turned up in a 1994 archaeological dig near an old brickworks, and in 2003 the town centre put up a thirteen-times-enlarged bronze replica of it. That bronze sits in a small Lower Rhine town that, on most maps, looks like a quiet suburb of Mönchengladbach. The truth is more complicated. Rheindahlen has been a Stone Age site, a medieval mayoralty, a Prussian town renamed by imperial decree, and, for more than half a century, the headquarters of the British armed forces in Germany.

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Image: Sascha Brück | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rheindahlen: The Hollow

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bodoklecksel, CC BY-SA 3.0. The original name was Dale, then Dalen, then Dahlen, and finally, by an act of the Prussian king Wilhelm I dated 24 December 1877 and published in February 1878, Rheindahlen. The renaming was completely prosaic. By the 1870s the German postal service had too many Dahlens, Dalheim...

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Image: Bodoklecksel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rheindahlen: Stones in the Clay

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Signal Corps Archive from United States, Public domain. Rheindahlen has been famous in German archaeology since 1908. The clay soils preserve organic material in a way that drier sites do not, and the area has yielded one of the richest concentrations of Old and New Stone Age remains in northwestern Europe. Excavations in the southern...

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Image: Signal Corps Archive from United States | Public domain

Rheindahlen: Mayoralty and Map

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Dalen first appears in the written record in 861 as a village in the Mühlgau, an estate that belonged to the Bishopric of Liège. Six years later it shows up as Dalon in a deed exchange by King Lothair II, though scholars now think that document actually refers to Spangdahlem near...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Rheindahlen: JHQ Rheindahlen

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Signal Corps Archive from United States, Public domain. In the early 1950s, looking for a site to consolidate British forces in West Germany, the Western Allies chose the Hardt Forest just northwest of Rheindahlen. The construction in 1954 turned up the Roman settlement; the resulting facility, JHQ Rheindahlen (Joint Headquarters), be...

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Image: Signal Corps Archive from United States | Public domain

Rheindahlen: Mining Under the Surface

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris06, Public domain. The land around Rheindahlen sits at the western edge of the Lower Rhine Bay, where loess deposits up to ten metres thick from the last ice age cover gravel, sand and the lignite seams that run down to the Tertiary period bedrock. Some of those seams are 150 metres thick. The Garz...

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Image: Chris06 | Public domain