Qualla: Wiesmoor

Wiesmoor: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michiel1972, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1925, the engineers at the Wiesmoor peat-burning power station noticed that they had a problem and an opportunity stacked on top of each other. The plant ran hot. Waste heat poured out by the megawatt, energy with nowhere useful to go in the middle of a drained East Frisian bog. So they piped it into glasshouses. By the 1930s, the greenhouse complex at Wiesmoor covered roughly 75,000 square meters and was the largest in Europe — a small ocean of glass, lit from below by the heat of a power plant burning the bog the town stood on. Today the peat power station is gone, decommissioned in 1966 and replaced by a gas turbine plant that was itself demolished in 1995. The greenhouses remain. The town calls itself the Blütenstadt, the Flower City, and runs an annual festival that ends with a queen parachuting into a sports ground.

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Image: Michiel1972 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wiesmoor: The Newest Old Town in East Frisia

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DrMKugler (Diskussion), CC0. Wiesmoor is the youngest town in East Frisia. It received its town rights on 16 March 2006, and two days later celebrated the centenary of its founding — a 100-year-old settlement granted formal township only on its hundredth birthday. The chronology has a strange recursive quali...

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Image: DrMKugler (Diskussion) | CC0

Wiesmoor: Industrial Peat and a Prussian Plan

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthias Süßen at de.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around 1900 a Prussian agricultural ministry official named Dr. Eberhard Ramm proposed something audacious: harvest peat by industrial machine instead of by hand spade. The traditional Fehn colonies had cut peat one strip at a time for centuries, but Ramm imagined large-scale mec...

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Image: Matthias Süßen at de.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wiesmoor: Greenhouses, Cucumbers, and a Blossom Queen

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lisa1223S, CC BY-SA 4.0. The waste-heat greenhouses, expanded after the war by the Ernst Benary flower company with twenty new houses and forty hectares of outdoor growing, turned Wiesmoor into a serious horticultural producer. About 200 people worked the greenhouses in the early 1950s, growing tomatoes ...

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Image: Lisa1223S | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wiesmoor: Honesty About 1944 and 1989

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Klinkenborg, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two harder dates sit in the town's chronology. During the Second World War, the Wiesmoor area held a forced-labor subcamp attached to the Nazi prison in Emden — part of the broader system of forced labor under German rule, and a piece of local history the town now acknowledges in...

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Image: Klinkenborg | CC BY-SA 4.0