Otzweiler

Otzweiler
Coat of arms
Otzweiler
Location of Otzweiler within Bad Kreuznach district
Coordinates: 49°42′46″N 07°30′33″E / 49.71278°N 7.50917°E / 49.71278; 7.50917Coordinates: 49°42′46″N 07°30′33″E / 49.71278°N 7.50917°E / 49.71278; 7.50917
Country	Germany
State	Rhineland-Palatinate
District	Bad Kreuznach
Municipal assoc.	Kirn-Land
Government
• Mayor	Frank Müller
Area
• Total	3.11 km2 (1.20 sq mi)
Elevation	300 m (1,000 ft)
Population (2015-12-31)
• Total	202
• Density	65/km2 (170/sq mi)
Time zone	CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2)
Postal codes	55606
Dialling codes	06757
Vehicle registration	KH

Otzweiler 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 Kirn-Land, whose seat is in the town of Kirn, although this lies outside the Verbandsgemeinde.

Otzweiler lies on the Großbach in the North Palatine Uplands. It borders on two neighbouring districts, Kusel and Birkenfeld.

Clockwise from the north, Otzweiler’s neighbours are the municipalities of Becherbach bei Kirn and Limbach, both of which likewise lie within the Bad Kreuznach district, the municipality of Hoppstädten in the neighbouring Kusel district and the municipalities of Sien, Sienhachenbach (although this boundary is confined to one point) and Schmidthachenbach in the neighbouring Birkenfeld district.

From the Early and High Middle Ages, little is known about Otzweiler. In the 14th century, Otzweiler belonged to the Lordship of the Waldgraves at the Kyrburg (castle). In 1375, the Waldgraves Otto and Friedrich of Kyrburg shared out landholds and rights between themselves that they owned in the Amt of Otzweiler, which also comprised, among other places, Hundsbach, Schweinschied and Löllbach. Historian Wilhelm Fabricius presumed that the village had arisen from a Waldgravial estate in the court region of Becherbach and that it had originally belonged to the Hochgericht auf der Heide (“High Court on the Heath”). Otzweiler, which was then made up of only this estate and two mills, grew over time into a bigger settlement. In the early 16th century, the village belonged to the Schultheißerei of Sien within the Waldgravial Amt of Kyrburg. Since there were also Sponheim subjects living in Otzweiler, the Counts of Sponheim and later their rightful successor, the Margrave of Baden, maintained a claim to territorial ascendancy over the village as holders of the Amt of Naumburg. The disagreements over rights arising from this between the Amt of Salen-Kyrburg and the Badish Amt of Naumburg were arbitrated in 1757 so that the landholds and the inhabitants of Otzweiler would remain under the joint administration of both Ämter. The inhabitants only had a unified administration when the French Revolutionary rulers assigned Otzweiler to the newly created Mairie (“Mayoralty”) of Schmidthachenbach in the Canton of Grumbach. After the end of the by then Napoleonic French rule in 1814, there was a short period of Prussian rule after which Otzweiler passed in 1816 to the Oberschultheißerei of Hundsbach in the Hesse-Homburg Oberamt of Meisenheim. In the early 1820s, this body’s seat moved from Hundsbach to Becherbach bei Kirn, where the Amt administration responsible for Otzweiler remained until 1940. Then, the Amt of Becherbach was dissolved and Otzweiler passed to the Amt of Kirn-Land. It remains in the Verbandsgemeinde of that same name today. In 1864, there were 71 families living in 57 houses in Otzweiler. The greater part of the population of this village of more than 300 inhabitants was Evangelical.