Niederalben is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Kusel-Altenglan, whose seat is in Kusel.
Geography
Location The municipality lies in the Steinalb valley in the Western Palatinate. The municipal area is 72.7% wooded. Niederalben lies at an elevation of between 180 and 250 m above sea level on the Steinalb's left bank. This brook empties into the Glan only a few hundred metres downstream from the village. Running alongside the brook is a village bypass.
The streets within the village itself sprout off the original through road that the bypass has now replaced and lead into the little side dales. Elevations outside the village reach heights of greater than 400 m above sea level. Among the more noteworthy of these is the Mittagsfels, with its craggy steep slopes looming over the built-up area.
The Glan and Steinalb valleys are rather narrow, and on either side, a broad plateau spreads out. Two thirds of the former municipal area (before 1938) today lies within the Baumholder Troop Drilling Ground, a military facility created by the Nazis.
Neighbouring municipalities Niederalben borders in the north on the Baumholder Troop Drilling Ground, in the east on the municipality of Sankt Julian, in the south on the municipality of Ulmet and in the west on the municipality of Rathsweiler.
Constituent communities Also belonging to Niederalben is the outlying homestead of Neuwirtshaus.
Municipality’s layout Niederalben's appearance is characterized by its topographical location. The street with the newer houses runs parallel to the Steinalb, right near which building was formerly avoided owing to the flooding danger. In the narrow side dales, two centres have formed, called Oberdorf and Unterdorf ("upper village" and "lower village"). Where the two side dales meet stands the old village church. Nearby stands the Evangelical parish hall, which long served as a stand-in church, although the old church has now been properly renovated and now once more fulfils its original purpose.
The trend towards "modernity" claimed many old farmhouses in the rush to convert existing properties, often radically, into modern dwellings, but nowadays the trend is more towards striving to preserve older building forms. The municipality has become almost wholly a residential community, a great shift from its former function as a pure farming village. In 1994, the phenological weather station run by the German Weather Service in Offenbach was closed after having existed since the end of the Second World War. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the municipality had a vast woodland in the Steinalb area that was tended by the municipality's own forester. This forest, along with a great part of the old municipal area, now belongs to the Baumholder Troop Drilling Ground, a big restricted area, and is now tended by the state forest administration in Baumholder.
A forester's house for the Steinalb area long stood in Niederalben, but this has since been sold. The main farming lands are found on the high plateau on either side of the dale. The greater part of the municipal woodland now found in what is left of the municipal area was planted after the Second World War. Within the municipal area lie two nature conservation areas, "Mittagsfels" with its dry grassland and rare flora, and "Steinalbmündung", a bird conservation area.
History
Antiquity Prehistoric archaeological finds within Niederalben's current limits are not directly established. Right at the municipal limit, however, in the cadastral area known as Schwarzland, now inside the Baumholder Troop Drilling Ground, two urn graves were unearthed in 1938 from La Tène times (about 500 BC). The urns along with grave goods were handed over to the monument office in Trier that was then responsible for such things.
Prehistoric hammerstones have been found in within Niederalben's limits. The broader area around the village, too, is quite rich in prehistoric finds from the Middle and New Stone Age. Already in prehistoric times, there were linking trails over the heights leading towards Trier, and later, a Roman road ran through what is now the municipal area. Finds from Roman times have not turned up in Niederalben. It is likely that the area originally lay in the Lautern royal forest, but did not belong to the lands that Frankish kings donated to ecclesiastical lordships such as the Bishopric of Verdun or the Bishopric of Reims.
Middle Ages In 1287, Hunhausen (see vanished villages below) had its first documentary mention. About 1290, a document mentioned a man named Wilmar Vilemann von Alben, who may well have been the first in a line of lesser noblemen of the house of Alben, who in the Late Middle Ages held important offices under Emperor Sigismund in Vienna and Hungary. His significance is that his noble house, "Alben", bears the same name as the village, although the latter also bears the prefix Nieder— ("Nether" or "Lower"). Johann von Agram from the German noble family of Alben became Chancellor of Fünfkirchen, and his brother became Bishop of Fünfkirchen. One of the first written records about the area is a Weistum (a Weistum – cognate with English wisdom – was a legal pronouncement issued by men learned in law in the Middle Ages and early modern times) from the Hochgericht auf der Heide ("High Court on the Heath") to which a letter of enfeoffment refers as early as 1351.
The High Court on the Heath – a geographical area as well as an actual court – was the land between the Steinalb, the Glan and the Nahe, which in the late 10th century became more heavily settled, as witnessed in documents from both Emperor Otto III and Archbishop Willigis of Mainz. It is likely that the area later passed to the Electorate of the Palatinate as an Imperial pledge, and was then transferred by that state to the Waldgraves and Rhinegraves of Steinkallenfels and Grumbach, along with the high court jurisdiction.
Already by Ottonian times, the area was no longer held by the kingly treasury anyway. In a directory of fiefs from about 1200 for the Rhinegrave Wolfram, it says: "Item de Abbate de Sancto Albano habet Ringravius in feodo Helbach und Wiselbach apud Winterhuche, duas villas cum omni iure." This text in somewhat fractured Mediaeval Latin – it even has the German word und thrown in – roughly translates as "Likewise from Saint Alban’s Abbey, the Rhinegrave has in fief Helbach and Wiselbach near Winterhuche, two estates with all rights." The high court jurisdiction in the region of the High Court on the Heath was never challenged. In 1429, the Waldgraves and Rhinegraves enfeoffed a man named Johann von Hagen with the villages and courts of Alben, Nyderalben and Hunehausen. Here, the name Alben was used for a place that still exists now, part of Niederalben, and today customarily called the Oberdorf ("upper village").
Modern times In the 16th century, Niederalben – here meaning only the part today customarily called the Unterdorf ("lower village") – passed to the Lords of Groroth. The Lords of Hagen owned 18 house-based persons while the Lords of Groroth owned eight or nine in what were then the two villages. In 1650, the rights held by the Lords of Groroth passed back to the Rhinegraves. In 1791, the last Lord of Hagen died, and thus Niederalben likewise passed back to the Rhinegraves.
Recent times During the time of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era that followed, the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank were annexed by France. Niederalben found itself within the French state in 1801. With the new political arrangement and within the new boundaries, Niederalben found itself in the Canton of Grumbach, the Arrondissement of Birkenfeld and the Department of Sarre. After French rule, the Congress of Vienna drew new boundaries yet again. In 1816, Niederalben passed to the Principality of Lichtenberg, a newly created exclave of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, which in 1826 became the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. As part of this state, it passed in 1834 by sale to the Kingdom of Prussia, which made this area into the Sankt Wendel district. Later, after the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles stipulated, among other things, that 26 of the Sankt Wendel district’s 94 municipalities had to be ceded to the British- and French-occupied Saar. The remaining 68 municipalities then bore the designation "Restkreis St. Wendel-Baumholder", with the first syllable of Restkreis having the same meaning as in English, in the sense of "left over". Niederalben belonged to this district until 1937, when it was transferred to the Birkenfeld district, which had formerly been under Oldenburg administration. After Adolf Hitler’s downfall and Germany's defeat in the Second World War, the municipality was grouped into the then newly founded (1946) state of Rhineland-Palatinate, all the while still in the Birkenfeld district, but now also in the Regierungsbezirk of Koblenz. In the course of administrative restructuring in the state, Niederalben passed to the Regierungsbezirk of Rheinhessen-Pfalz, and in 1969, it was transferred, this time to the Kusel district, in which it remains today. In 1972, Niederalben was grouped as an Ortsgemeinde into the Verbandsgemeinde of Altenglan. In 1974, the village bypass was built.
Population development In 1429, twenty-seven house-based persons were counted in what is now Niederalben. Going by this figure, the total population was some 200 inhabitants. In the Thirty Years' War and French King Louis XIV's wars of conquest, there was great loss of life. Nevertheless, by the 18th century the population had grown roughly threefold over what it had been in the 15th, first with new settlers after the war and then strong growth. This made many inhabitants in the 19th century choose emigration. In 1833, there were 526 persons living in Niederalben in 87 families. Among the adults were 131 men and 161 women, while among the children were 161 boys and 103 girls. Seven people lived outside the village. By religion, 449 inhabitants were Evangelical and 70 Catholic. There were no Jews, nor were there any Mennonites.
In the late 19th century, and in the earlier half of the 20th, the population had evened off to a level of 500 inhabitants. Between 1945 and 1950 came a noticeable upswing from 520 to 575 inhabitants, brought about by ethnic Germans driven out of Germany's former eastern territories and people who had fled East Germany arriving in Niederalben. Between 1950 and 1960, the population grew at first only slowly, and then abruptly dropped off to about 500. Many of those who had been forced to come here left again seeking places with better industrial structure. Even young people had no job opportunities.
In 1996, the village had only 400 inhabitants, of whom almost a fourth were over 60 years of age. Also counted in that total are asylum seekers with many children. By 2007, the population had further fallen to 343. Many people in the last century were employed on the Baumholder Troop Drilling Ground, but it must be borne in mind that this is being dissolved bit by bit. Thus, the population might yet further shrink. For decades now, young people have had to seek their livelihoods elsewhere, in other regions.
The following table shows population development over the centuries for Niederalben: Year 1815 1860 1900 1925 1958 2007 Total 356 583 478 518 564 343
Municipality’s name