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Völklingen Ironworks
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How it came to be
In 1873 Julius Buch built a steelworks on the Saar at Völklingen in Saarland, western Germany. It closed within a few years and was bought by Carl Röchling. Work on a blast furnace began in 1881, and two years later the first furnace was fired.
A coking plant followed in 1897, and in 1900 gas-blowing engines driven by furnace gas made it the first large ironworks to run its blast furnaces on furnace gas. By the 1910s it was Germany's largest maker of steel beams. In both world wars people from occupied territories and prisoners of war were forced to work here.
Pig iron production stopped in 1986 in the steel crisis. Because nothing new was added after the coking plant was rebuilt in 1935, the works still looks as it did in the 1930s. It was inscribed in 1994 as the only intact integrated ironworks of the 19th and 20th centuries left in western Europe and North America.
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