Stadtallendorf

Stadtallendorf tells its hardest history and makes hazelnut sweets. The town is young and its origin sombre: in the 1930s the forests here concealed two of the Reich's largest explosives works, vast camouflaged plants where thousands — including forced labourers from across occupied Europe — filled munitions; the postwar settlement that grew in the dispersed factory quarters became a city, and it chose documentation over silence: the DIZ documentation and information centre preserves the sites and testimonies, an exemplary municipal reckoning that gives the young town a mature conscience.

The sweet chapter arrived in 1956: Ferrero built its German works here, and Stadtallendorf has scented of roasted hazelnuts ever since — Hanuta, Duplo and their kin ship from the plants that rank among the town's great employers, alongside metal industries inherited from the conversion years. Migration built the citizenry: workers from many nations made the young city one of Hesse's most international, its festivals and faith communities reflecting the fact.

Daily life is practically arranged — schools, halls, the generous woods that once hid the works now serving joggers and cyclists, with Marburg's university towers twenty minutes west and the Vogelsberg's slopes east. Honest about its founding, industrious in its present, chocolate-scented on the breeze: Stadtallendorf turned an inheritance of ordnance into ordinary, well-documented peace.