Qualla: Segeberger Kalkberg

Segeberger Kalkberg: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 12:28:33 GMT

Photo credit Wilhelm Dreesen, Public domain. The name is wrong, and so is the size. Bad Segeberg's Kalkberg means "chalk mountain," but there is no chalk in it: the white rock standing over the town centre is gypsum, calcium sulfate, not calcium carbonate. And it used to be a great deal bigger. The hill once rose more than 110 metres, and reconstructions put the original at 120 or more. It measures 91 metres today. Centuries of quarrying carted roughly two-thirds of its mass away in wagons, and what the diggers left behind was a hollowed-out stump with a cave in its belly and a hole in its side big enough to hold twelve thousand people.

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Image: Wilhelm Dreesen | Public domain

Segeberger Kalkberg: A Sea That Dried Up

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 12:28:33 GMT

Photo credit Presse03, CC BY-SA 3.0. Two hundred and fifty million years ago the Zechstein Sea lay over northern Europe and evaporated, leaving thick beds of sulfate and salt. Buried under later rock, those salts behaved the way salt does under pressure: being less dense than what lay above, they flowed together and...

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Image: Presse03 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Segeberger Kalkberg: Murder on the Siegsburg

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 12:28:33 GMT

Photo credit Wusel007, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1134 Emperor Lothar built a castle on the hill, then called the Alberg, and named it Siegsburg. The Counts of Schauenburg and Holstein twice made it the seat of a junior branch of the family, the little county of Holstein-Segeberg. Adolphus V the Pomeranian held it from 1273 t...

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Image: Wusel007 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Segeberger Kalkberg: Carried Away in Wagons

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 12:28:33 GMT

Photo credit Sujalajus, CC BY-SA 4.0. Gypsum was the hill's other export, and for centuries the digging simply went on. Before the First World War the Kalkberg belonged to the Prussian state, which took a solid annual profit from the quarry, and the pressure to keep going was real. What changed the argument was what ...

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Image: Sujalajus | CC BY-SA 4.0

Segeberger Kalkberg: Twenty-Five Thousand Sleepers

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 12:28:33 GMT

Photo credit Hinrix, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 16 March 1913, seminary students climbed into a hole that quarry workers had opened in the lower part of the rock. They found a cave system that surveyors have since traced to 2,260 metres of passages - the second-longest gypsum cave in Germany. It turned out to be one of the ...

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Image: Hinrix | CC BY-SA 3.0

Segeberger Kalkberg: Apaches in the Quarry Pit

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 12:28:33 GMT

Photo credit Hinrix, CC BY-SA 3.0. The hole the quarrying left had one obvious use, and between 1934 and 1937 the Reich Labour Service turned it into an amphitheatre. It opened in 1937 as the Nordmarkfeierstätte, a Nazi assembly ground built to stage the regime to itself, with roughly 7,800 seats and standing room...

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Image: Hinrix | CC BY-SA 3.0