[7] The farmers of the Rhineland needed powerful horses to work the heavy loess soil of the area.

In the nineteenth century various heavy horses were imported from neighbouring countries – Belgium, Denmark, France and the Netherlands – as were Clydesdale, Shire and Suffolk Punch animals from England; these led to little improvement of the local stock, partly because of acclimatisation problems, partly because of lack of a clear direction.

[7] In the 1870s the decision was taken at the Prussian state stud at Schloss Wickrath, at that time in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia, to concentrate breeding on the Belgian type.

Numbers of the breed grew rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, and by 1946 there were 26,990 registered mares.

[6] Because of the political division of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, which lasted until the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there was for more than fifty years no possibility of interbreeding between populations of the Rhenish German Coldblood in West Germany and those in the East.