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| The Mittelland Canal officially starts at the "Nasse Dreieck" at Bergeshövede and by 2003 will be linked directly with Berlin via the new Elbe Aqueduct (at Magdeburg) and the re-routed Elbe-Havel Canal. |
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| On April 1st
1905, after the usual delays caused by political posturing, the
proposal to build the Mittelland Canal as far as Hannover was
accepted. The first section to the River Weser at Minden was completed by the 15th February 1915 and Hannover was reached by the autumn of 1916. |
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| Kaiser Wilhelm
II came to the opening of the canal but the occasion was somewhat
low key as WW1 was still being fought. It was thought that the bridge over the Mittelland Canal near the "Nasse Dreieck" (the Wet Junction) would be named by the Kaiser but this was not the case. The several hundred spectators were also disappointed that the wall of water they expected to come rushing through the canal was replaced by a slow trickle which took several days to fill the canal. After the high cost of its building, the bridge was finally named the "Millionmark Bridge" by the locals. |
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| The massive canal
building programme of the 1930's saw the Mittelland Canal reach
the Elbe, at Magdeburg, in 1938. The outbreak of WW2 and the communist rule of East Germany saw the final link with the Elbe-Havel Canal remain incomplete. This final 2km link was opened in October 2003 after the completion of a $470 building project involving a huge aqueduct over the Elbe and the construction of two enormous locks. Use the Links page to learn more about this massive building project. |
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| The importance of the Mittelland Canal as an inter-Germany waterway can be seen as early as 1938. A book on the Mittelland Canal, published by the Reich Water Ministry, even shows the southern stretch of the DEK marked as the Mittelland Canal and the northern part of the DEK left unmarked. |
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| The requirement
of the German war industry for the transportation of huge amounts
of raw and finished materials placed great importance on the
East-West link and the enormous Hermann Goering Steel Works at
Salzgitter was connected to the Mittelland Canal by a special
feeder waterway. This huge factory employed up to 800,000 people
and annually produced 1.5million tons of raw steel. The Mauthausen concentration camp was built using the slag from the blast furnaces of the "Hermann Göring“ Reich Works. |
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| Today, standing at Beverghövede, you can see that the vast majority of traffic travels in the East-West direction and that the huge locks at Bevergern are little used. |
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