Warburg (German pronunciation: [ˈvaːɐ̯bʊʁk] ⓘ; Westphalian: Warberich or Warborg) is a town in eastern North Rhine-Westphalia, central Germany on the river Diemel near the three-state point shared by Hessen, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia.

In the 11th century there was on the Warburger Burgberg ("Castle Mountain") the "Wartburg", under whose protection people came and settled.

From the castle hill, there was a good view over the Diemel Valley, such that a close watch could be kept on the ford that merchants had to cross going to Warburg and Paderborn.

This ford on the Diemel was a crossroads of several ancient commercial roads and was crucial in the town's development into a central place.

In Der Grote Breff ("The Great Letter"), the newly united town's constitution was precisely framed and sealed.

The Great Letter is written in Middle Low German, the Hanseatic League's language, and stands as a substantial legal document.

There arose yet another superfluous government building in 1975 after the communities of the old Amt of Warburg-Land were amalgamated with Warburg, namely the Amt administration building on Kasseler Straße, which was forsaken by the district authorities in favour of the Behördenhaus ("Authority House") on Bahnhofstraße.

In the Thirty Years' War, great parts of die Hüffert and other villages in the area were sacked and destroyed, impoverishing the town.

Twenty-four thousand Prussian, Hanoverian, Hessian and British troops fought under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick and the Crown Prince of Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel) against a French army of 21,500 soldiers led by Lieutenant-General Le Chevalier du Muy and the Duke of Broglie.

The Prussians and their allies won, killing 8,000 French soldiers while losing only 1,500 themselves, leaving them free to sack the town.

The lands around Warburg's constituent community of Welda, once a border town between Westphalia, Waldeck and Hesse, have yielded forth archaeological evidence of a Celtic presence.

Likewise, Wormeln's surrounding area has yielded archaeological finds that point to ancient settlement.

Wormeln had its first documentary mention in 1018 in a donation document from Count Dodiko to Meinwerk, Bishop of Paderborn.

On 16 September 1810, Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia in Napoleonic times, decreed the convent's dissolution.

(each time at 31 December) During the Saxon Wars in the 8th century the area round the Diemel was incorporated into the Frankish realm.

The Syriac Orthodox Church's bishopric of Germany was founded in 1997 and has its Episcopal seat in the former Dominican monastery in Warburg.

The sharp upswing in the population as a whole was due to migration from the countryside, industries setting up shop in town, and railway operations.

Yet another famous townsman was Emil Herz, a publisher at the Ullstein-Verlag (until the Nazis forced him out as the company's director in 1934, after he had worked there for 30 years), who described in his book something of Jewish life in Warburg.

In the Middle Ages, the castle was mostly surrounded by a double wall ring, through which the old and new city gates lead to the breachstone.

[1] Council seat distribution:[5] Warburg's civic coat of arms might heraldically be described thus: In azure a fleur-de-lis argent.

The fleur-de-lis charge seen in today's arms originally appeared on coins minted in the town, beginning in 1227.

For a time in the 20th century, Warburg used a coat of arms based on the old greater seal, showing the walls, towers and gateway, but not the bishop.

The biggest fields of industry nowadays are automotive technology, steel and machine building, chemicals, woodworking and packaging.

Since 1721, brewing rights have been held by the Kohlschein family, known as Warburg-Beer (german: Warburger Bier) with variety of different beer-specialities.

With the "Prussian Fire Order" in the early 19th century, even the outlying communities were obliged to lay the groundwork for firefighting.

Beginning about 1850 in what is today Warburg's municipal area, the first structures of modern fire brigades were taking shape as "dousing and spraying teams".

After the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), it was veterans who had the idea of setting up volunteer fire brigades after the French example of the pompiers.