Welchweiler

The village's elevation is some 300 m above sea level and it lies on a small stream called the Welchbach, which runs down into the Sachsbach.

Welchweiler also meets the municipalities of Ulmet and Bosenbach at single points in the west and southeast respectively.

Most of Welchweiler's houses stand alongside the Kreisstraße that runs from Glanbrücken to Altenglan on small village streets.

The village expanded only slightly in the 19th century, and there was likewise not a great deal of growth after the Second World War.

[5] From the time of its founding, Welchweiler lay within the so-called Remigiusland, whose borders are laid out precisely in a 1355 Weistum (a Weistum – cognate with English wisdom – was a legal pronouncement issued by men learned in law in the Middle Ages and early modern times).

According to the document itself, Archbishop Baldwin of Trier received three Rhinegravial Burgmannen, the brothers Heinrich, Gerhard and Simon from Heppenheim (today an outlying centre of Worms), as armed men in his service, enfeoffing them with, among other things, a piece of land near Welchweiler.

[6] Welchweiler now shared a history with the County Palatine of Zweibrücken until this state was swept away in the throes of the French Revolution in 1801.

[7] During the time of Napoleonic French rule, from 1801 to 1814, Welchweiler belonged to the Mairie (“Mayoralty”) of Horschbach, the Canton of Wolfstein, the Arrondissement of Kaiserslautern and the Department of Mont-Tonnerre (or Donnersberg in German), whose capital was at Mainz.

By the time of the 1933 Reichstag elections, though, after Hitler had already seized power, local support for the Nazis had swollen to 49.3%.

Hitler’s success in these elections paved the way for his Enabling Act of 1933 (Ermächtigungsgesetz), thus starting the Third Reich in earnest.

[8] The villagers originally made their living at agriculture, but later many earned their livelihood as day labourers and forestry workers.

After the population was wiped out by sickness and the Thirty Years' War, the village needed to be settled all over again.

The two Ws on the dexter (armsbearer's right, viewer's left) side are an abbreviation of the municipality's name, Welchweiler.

The lion on the sinister (armsbearer's left, viewer's right) side is drawn from the arms formerly borne by the Duchy of Palatinate-Zweibrücken; it is the heraldic device of the House of Wittelsbach, which ruled Bavaria until 1918.

[14] Welchweiler holds its kermis (church consecration festival, locally known as the Kerwe) on the second weekend in August.

In 1784, the 27-year-old teacher Johann Geibel from Erzweiler (a now vanished village near Ulmet forsaken by its last few inhabitants in 1974 after having been incorporated into the Baumholder Troop Drilling Ground by the Nazis in 1933) served to bolster the teaching staff at the winter school in Welchweiler.

Coat of arms
Coat of arms