66 | 100 When the Rhine was walkable...
D?sseldorf 1942from the series 100 photos - 100 stories
Foto Koch celebrates 100 years and we tell THE best stories. For today's story, let's go back a few years: 1942, when the Rhine was actually completely frozen over - it's hard to believe!
The Rhine: a striking symbol for us D?sseldorfers and all those who live in the Rhineland. It is 1,232.7 km long and has its source in Switzerland. Even back then, it was the busiest waterway in the world and still is today.
A hard, long winter
In the winter of 1942, it was so cold that the freezing cold even caused the mighty, current-rich Rhine to freeze over! It was -20 degrees for several weeks and ice floes formed at first. These then froze together to form a closed ice sheet. People could walk 80 kilometers on the Rhine between D?sseldorf and Emmerich. But of course it also had negative aspects: traffic on the river came to a standstill due to the ice and the supply came to a standstill in large parts of western Germany. For this reason, icebreakers were deployed. Parts of the Rhine were also frozen over in the winter of 1913/1914, as well as in 1954, when the winter was particularly harsh in the southwest. Around 1894, the entire Rhine even froze over. This is hardly possible today, because from the middle of the nineteenth century the Rhine was converted into a traffic route, so that only parts, but not the whole Rhine, could freeze over. In addition, the Rhine itself is too warm today due to tributaries and sewage, so the chance of freezing is very small. If we look outside right now, we might even be able to imagine it a little. In some parts of Germany it was -25 degrees at night this week. A value of -12 degrees was also reached in D?sseldorf. On top of that, the Rhine is currently flooded, making it almost impossible to freeze over. But for us Rhinelanders, snow and this prolonged cold is unusual and we only know it like this from the Alpine region.
