Qualla: Rheine

Rheine: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Rheine begins, as so many German towns do, with the wrong river to ford. The Ems was wide here, sluggish, and shifty, and yet it lay across two important old merchant roads. Frankish soldiers fortified the crossing with a barrack yard around the time Louis the Pious was still signing documents; one such document, in 838, gives Rheine its earliest written name. A church followed the soldiers; more buildings followed the church. Almost five hundred years later, on 15 August 1327, Louis II, Bishop of Münster, finally handed the settlement its town charter. The river had decided where the town would be. Everything else - the bishops, the burning, the bombing, the textile mills, the Allied tanks - found Rheine because of that crossing.

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Rheine: Glowing Cannonballs, 1647

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Thirty Years' War almost erased the place. As the war wound to its long, exhausted close, Swedish and Hessian troops besieged imperial soldiers who had dug in inside Rheine. On the nights of 20 and 21 September 1647, and again on 19 October, glowing cannonballs arced over the...

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Rheine: Looms on the Ems

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What changed Rheine permanently was the Industrial Revolution. The textile industry took root along the Ems and grew into the city's economic backbone, sustaining it through most of the 19th and 20th centuries. The town stretched outward; on 1 April 1927, about ten thousand inhab...

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Rheine: Rails, Canals and the Bombers

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The same geography that made Rheine valuable to Frankish soldiers made it valuable, twelve centuries later, to Allied bomber crews. The Dortmund-Ems Canal passed through; major rail lines converged. During the Second World War, large-scale raids on 5 October 1944 and again on 21 ...

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Rheine: Walking Modern Rheine

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Today Rheine is the largest city in the district of Steinfurt - a place of about seventy-five thousand people, served by its own railway stations on the Münster-Rheine line and by Münster Osnabrück Airport thirty kilometres to the northwest. The city celebrated the 675th annivers...

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