Bretzenheim

Bretzenheim
Coat of arms
Bretzenheim
Location of Bretzenheim within Bad Kreuznach district
Coordinates: 49°52′41″N 7°53′55″E / 49.87806°N 7.89861°E / 49.87806; 7.89861Coordinates: 49°52′41″N 7°53′55″E / 49.87806°N 7.89861°E / 49.87806; 7.89861
Country	Germany
State	Rhineland-Palatinate
District	Bad Kreuznach
Municipal assoc.	Langenlonsheim
Government
• Mayor	Thomas Gleichmann (CDU)
Area
• Total	5.81 km2 (2.24 sq mi)
Elevation	102 m (335 ft)
Population (2015-12-31)
• Total	2,577
• Density	440/km2 (1,100/sq mi)
Time zone	CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2)
Postal codes	55559
Dialling codes	0671
Vehicle registration	KH
Website	www.bretzenheim.de

Bretzenheim is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Bad Kreuznach district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Langenlonsheim, whose seat is in the like-named municipality. Bretzenheim is a state-recognized tourism community and a winegrowing centre. It is also one of the district’s ten biggest municipalities.

Bretzenheim lies on the Nahe, 10 km up from its mouth where it empties into the Rhine at Bingen am Rhein to the north. The municipality lies just north of Bad Kreuznach.

Clockwise from the north, Bretzenheim’s neighbours are the municipality of Langenlonsheim, the town of Bad Kreuznach and the municipality of Guldental.

It was people of the Linear Pottery culture of the New Stone Age who, about 5000 BC, founded the first settlement of any great size at what is now Bretzenheim. A wealth of archaeological finds establish that even in the later epochs of this level of civilization as well as in the time of the Urnfield culture (Bronze Age) and Hallstatt or La Tène times (Iron Age), this place was prized as a good place for a settlement. Later, the Romans came to settle here, bearing witness to whose presence are remnants of several buildings as well as finds of coins and various other things. The Franks might first have appeared here beginning in the 6th century. They introduced a lasting phase of settlement and gave the place its name, meaning “Brezzo’s Home” or “Brizzo’s Home” (although nobody now knows who he was). About the mid 7th century, as historians have assumed, the Archbishop of Cologne acquired Bretzenheim as a royal donation, which he and his successors kept until 1790, although it remained a Free Imperial Domain. The first authoritative documentary mention of Bretzenheim goes back to 1057, when the village was temporarily awarded to the Polish queen Richeza as a “precaria”. Bretzenheim might have taken on its current village structure sometime about the year 1000, to which time the building of the village fortifications with their wall, moats and three gates can be dated. The lordship over the village was exercised by those whom the Archbishop of Cologne enfeoffed, the Electorate of Cologne having been the landholder in the Free Imperial Domain of Bretzenheim until 1789. The fiefholders were at first the Counts Palatine of the Rhine, followed by the Counts of Falkenstein in various lines before Count Alexander II of Velen bought the lordship in 1642. After his descendant Count Alexander IV of Velen died in 1733 without an heir, the Imperial lordship passed in 1734 to Ambrosius Franz von Virmont, who in 1744 likewise died without an heir, whereupon Baron Ignaz Felix von Roll zu Bernau was enfeoffed with Bretzenheim, selling it in 1772 to Count Karl August von Heydeck. This was the beginning of a special historical epoch in Bretzenheim. Count Karl August was Elector Karl Theodor’s illegitimate, and still underage, son, and in 1774, he was raised to Imperial Count (Reichsgraf) and in 1789 to Imperial Prince (Reichsfürst), thus raising Bretzenheim itself from Imperial lordship (Reichsherrschaft) to Imperial principality (Reichsfürstentum). Among other things, this gave the Prince the right to mint his own coins, which were called Bretzenheimer Taler. Only six years later, though, in 1795, the principality was beaten within the framework of the Napoleonic Wars and occupied by the French along with the rest of the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank. After the Congress of Vienna, Bretzenheim was grouped into Prussia’s Rhine Province. The apportionment of feudal rights in the village had been laid down in 1456 by a Weistum (cognate with English wisdom, this was a legal pronouncement issued by men learned in law in the Middle Ages and early modern times), which swept all orally handed-down principles aside. While the holders of the village lordship over Bretzenheim and Winzenheim lived at their castles and palaces outside Bretzenheim and had their rights exercised through an Amtmann, Emich Count of Falkenstein actually resided in Bretzenheim from 1589 to 1620, and even had a Schloss built, although this was largely destroyed in the Thirty Years' War. Later, the Count of Velen built a new Schloss wing, and his successor expanded the complex, which nowadays is still mostly preserved in the village centre. Bretzenheim earned itself a measure of infamy after the Second World War. On parts of Bretzenheim’s municipal area from 1945 to 1948 lay a prisoner-of-war camp, the so-called Feld des Jammers (“Field of Misery”), one of the Rheinwiesenlager. A monument at the site nowadays commemorates this camp and its occupants.