[4] Bretzenheim lies on the Nahe, 10 km up from its mouth where it empties into the Rhine at Bingen am Rhein to the north.

It was people of the Linear Pottery culture of the New Stone Age who, about 5000 BC, founded the first settlement of any great size at what is now Bretzenheim.

About the mid 7th century, as historians have assumed, the Archbishop of Cologne acquired Bretzenheim as a royal donation, which he and his successors kept until 1790, although it remained a Free Imperial Domain.

The first authoritative documentary mention of Bretzenheim goes back to 1057, when the village was temporarily awarded to the Polish queen Richeza as a “precaria”.

Only six years later, though, in 1795, the principality was beaten within the framework of the Napoleonic Wars and occupied by the French along with the rest of the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank.

The apportionment of feudal rights in the village had been laid down in 1456 by a Weistum (cognate with English wisdom, this was a legal pronouncement issued by men learned in law in the Middle Ages and early modern times), which swept all orally handed-down principles aside.

Later, the Count of Velen built a new Schloss wing, and his successor expanded the complex, which nowadays is still mostly preserved in the village centre.

On parts of Bretzenheim’s municipal area from 1945 to 1948 lay a prisoner-of-war camp, the so-called Feld des Jammers (“Field of Misery”), one of the Rheinwiesenlager.

Standing today on Bundesstraße 48 (Naheweinstraße), between Bretzenheim and Bad Kreuznach, is a memorial at the site where once lay a notorious prison camp from April 1945 to late 1948, one that was known throughout Germany as the “Field of Misery” (Feld des Jammers).

It was not exactly a prisoner-of-war camp, for it had been decided by SHAEF commander in chief Dwight D. Eisenhower that the Wehrmacht soldiers being kept there were to be treated as “Disarmed Enemy Forces” rather than prisoners of war so that they would not be covered by the Geneva Convention, because of the logistical impossibility of feeding millions of surrendered German soldiers at the levels required by the Geneva Convention during the food crisis of 1945.

The broad camp, which spread out behind and to both sides of where the memorial now stands, and all the way to the vineyards, had an area of 210 to 220 ha, divided into 24 “cages”.

Hundreds of thousands of prisoners funnelled through this camp, with some being released to return to their homelands, and others being transported to France for forced labour.

A horrifyingly great number of prisoners did not survive the camp, dying of hunger or falling victim to illness.

Records take the form of documents, reports, journals, drawings, photographs, artefacts, handbills, placards and experiential accounts.

In financial houses, in livestock dealing and commodity trading, Jewish inhabitants played an important role.

The municipal election held on 7 June 2009 yielded the following results:[11] Bretzenheim's mayor is Olaf Budde.

The following are listed buildings or sites in Rhineland-Palatinate’s Directory of Cultural Monuments:[12] Among the wealth of architectural witnesses to Bretzenheim's history, the Felseneremitage (or simply Eremitage, meaning “Hermitage”; Felsen means “cliff”), a place of worship wholly hewn out of a cliff that might even date from antiquity, and that underwent a conversion in early Christian times, is held to be the greatest sightseeing feature, and to be unique north of the Alps.

In the time of the Third Reich, the graveyard was not removed: the then mayor, Karl Schmidt, after statements made by Hedwig Graf née Schweig, a Jewish woman married to an Evangelical man and who survived the Nazis in Bretzenheim, opposed the authorities’ demands to obliterate the graveyard.

Overturned gravestones were once again set upright, trees were trimmed, hedges were removed and the path was made passable once more.

The graveyard lies at the municipal limit between Bretzenheim and Bad Kreuznach in the zone known as “Johanneshohl” (in the rural cadastral area called “Auf dem Galgen”).

[17] Daily needs are ensured by three grocery markets, one clothing discounter, one hairdresser, one florist's shop, two bakeries with cafés, eleven winemakers, one hotel with a restaurant, two inns, many bed and breakfast rooms and flats, four medical practices and one veterinary clinic.

The transmitter lies beneath the churchtower at Nativity of Mary Parish Church and sends its programme on 87.9 MHz with an output of 160 W (vertically polarized), reaching from Bad Kreuznach as far as Bingen am Rhein.

At Bretzenheim's disposal is a very favourable transport infrastructure with its railway station on the Regionalbahn line serving Bingen am Rhein, Bad Kreuznach and Kaiserslautern (Nahe Valley Railway), three stops on the RNN regional bus network serving Stromberg and Bad Kreuznach, and the nearby link to the Autobahnen A 61 and A 63.

The district seat of Bad Kreuznach borders directly on Bretzenheim's municipal area and can also be reached easily on the Naheradweg (cycle path) between Bingen and Nahequelle (“Source of the Nahe”) near Selbach in the Saarland.