Cheiner Torfmoor, Germany
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Germany’s most peaceable panorama owes its existence to 1 of its most paranoid.
The Grünes Band — the Green Belt threading 860 miles alongside the former border between West Germany and communist East Germany — is now a sweep of orchids, wetlands and bird-rich moorland.
It started life as a fortified no-man’s land, wired with mines and patrolled day and evening to maintain residents in the East from escaping.
Walk it right now, and the Cold War feels impossibly distant. There’s birdsong, frogs and a boardwalk over the Cheiner Torfmoor’s marsh orchids.
But the quiet is just doable as a result of folks had been as soon as compelled to remain out.
Today, in the northern areas of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, roughly between Hamburg and Berlin, the Cheiner Torfmoor, or Cheiner Heath, is one of the nation’s most well-known wetlands.
In spring and summer time it turns into a mosaic of moorland, wetlands and swamp forests, crammed with birds and croaking frogs. In March and April, the moor blazes with coloration when round 6,000 orchids erupt into bloom, together with the uncommon violet-colored marsh orchid. A boardwalk signifies that guests can immerse themselves in the show with out damaging the flowers or the wealthy soil beneath.
The sobering origins of this unspoiled biosphere belong in the Cold War. From 1949 till 1989, this was half of the so-called Innerdeutsche Grenze, or inner-German border — the frontier that separated West Germany from the communist German Democratic Republic in the east.
On the GDR facet, it was a place of barbed wire, minefields, watchtowers and computerized firing gadgets — to not repel invaders, however to cease residents from escaping. Around three miles vast, the GDR’s militarized restriction zone, the so-called Sperrzone, ran the size of the Innerdeutsche Grenze, and was patrolled round the clock.
The regime known as it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall — the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier — however the goal was unmistakable: maintain GDR residents in.
Beyond the central strip, the outer approaches of the Sperrzone had been cleared of settlements and civilian exercise, creating a no-man’s land — and, unintentionally, nature reserve.
Approaching the border with binoculars was prohibited. Yet regardless of the dangers, the space quickly drew the consideration of birdwatchers on each side.
“We discovered that over 90% of the bird species that were rare or highly endangered in Bavaria — such as the whinchat, the corn bunting and the European nightjar — could be found in the Green Belt,” says Kai Frobel, who who was born in Hassenberg, round 200 miles south of the Cheiner Torfmoor, in 1959. “It became a final retreat for many species, and it still is today.”
Today Frobel is a professor for environmental ecology, however rising up in the shadow of the border he was an avid birdwatcher when the Sperrzone was in place.
From a nature conservation standpoint, the Iron Curtain was a blessing — a 40-year unintended wildlife sanctuary. So it was no shock that in December 1989, a month after the Berlin Wall got here down, Frobel initiated a assembly in Hof, one other border city south of the Cheiner Torfmoor, to debate the future of the unintended nature reserve.
Four hundred conservationists from each side of the border turned up. This is the place the identify and the idea of the Grünes Band had been born. The members unanimously accepted a decision to guard it below the umbrella of the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation, also called BUND. (Later, Frobel would grow to be spokesperson for the Green Belt challenge of its its Bavaria department.)
The first step in the direction of preservation was to ascertain what there was to protect. A formal survey of the ecosystems and species alongside the Grünes Band was rapidly begun, carried out by ornithologists, botanists, and entomologists on behalf of BUND. In 2001, the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation known as for the creation of formal nature reserves in as many areas as doable. The intention was a Germany-wide system of ecological linkages — however the newly reunified authorities most popular to return land to earlier homeowners.
The pushback ended in 2002, when none aside from Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR’s last-ever president, endorsed the initiative by changing into the first particular person to purchase a “Green Belt share,” a promotional instrument created by BUND. His help introduced wider public backing.
In 2005 German Chancellor Angela Merkel designated the Grünes Band as half of Germany’s National Natural Heritage. This ensured that land nonetheless owned by the German authorities alongside the Green Belt was transferred free of cost to the numerous regional states as nature reserves — clearing the approach for what Frobel and his colleagues had voted for 16 years earlier. In 2017, Frobel and the then-chairman of the Nature Conservation Union Hubert Weiger acquired the German Environmental Award, Europe’s most prestigious environmental prize, for his or her activism.
Today, the Grünes Band covers all the former border land, passing by six German states. It hyperlinks wetlands, forests, grasslands, and river meadows, and harbors greater than 1,200 uncommon and endangered species of bugs and animals — Germany’s longest biotope community. In 2024, it was submitted for consideration for UNESCO’s World Heritage record.
“We must tell the story of why there is no longer a border there today,” says Olaf Zimmermann, managing director of the German Cultural Council, who was instrumental in getting it onto Germany’s record of proposed UNESCO websites. “That the citizens of the GDR managed to bring down this border with a peaceful revolution, without a single shot being fired.”
Sadly, this fascinating story doesn’t imply that the Green Belt might be protected in perpetuity. Although massive elements are protected, politicians may redefine its utilization — as occurred in the state of Hesse in 2024, when the native authorities diminished the land designated for its nature reserve, following protests by native communities, searching and farming associations.
For greater than a decade, BUND has been working with environmentalists and voluntary teams throughout Europe to increase the Grünes Band past Germany, creating a European Green Belt — a sequence of biospheres working practically 8,000 miles from the Barents Sea to the Adriatic and the Black Sea, following the former Cold War borders of 24 states.
Other former frontiers present why the concept issues. More than 100 uncommon species —together with Siberian musk deer and Asiatic black bears — have discovered shelter in the DMZ between North and South Korea. The uncommon Cyprus mouflon and the Eurasian stone curlew are thriving in the 112-mile UN buffer zone dividing the island of Cyprus.
There’s one other, more and more compelling rationale to show border zones into nature reserves: protection.
In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, EU nations bordering Russia and Belarus have erected border fences and fortifications, whereas the Baltic states have begun planning a “Baltic Defense Line,” full with bunkers and anti-tank ditches — and utilizing pure defenses like bogs and rivers. Many Baltic specialists additionally name for peatland restoration to be added.
Renaturalization doesn’t solely provide a defensive benefit; restored wetlands can revive biodiversity, present properties for endangered animals, soak up floodwaters and seize CO2. Drained bogs, on the different hand, launch carbon, contributing to world warming.
“Biodiversity enables nature to ‘produce’ more adaptations to changing conditions,” says Katrin Evers, BUND’s challenge supervisor for biodiversity. “Intact forests or moors retain water in the area, and can thus protect against flooding on the one hand and drought on the other. They also filter the water and provide shade — in other words, they ensure a certain degree of climate resilience.”
Back on the Cheiner heath, a boarded-up GDR watchtower coated in graffiti nonetheless stands amidst the orchids — a reminder that the Green Belt stays a dwelling memorial to the painful division and peaceable reunification of Germany. The Grünes Band is a panorama of remembrance in addition to a unprecedented community of ecosystems. It’s an surroundings that instantly connects nature and historical past — and the place a border constructed for worry could but provide a blueprint for resilience.