Edersee

The Eder barrier, which creates the Edersee.

The Edersee is a large reservoir created by the construction, from 1908 to 1914, of a dam across the Eder river, near the small town of Waldeck in northern Hessen, Germany, to generate hydropower and regulate water levels for shipping on the Weser river.

The dam was destroyed by special bouncing bombs dropped by British Lancaster bombers during the night of May 16/17, 1943, creating massive destruction and loss of life downstream (see Operation Chastise), including the drowning death of 749 Ukrainian POWs in a labor camp just below the dam. Through the breach in the dam, 70 meters wide and 22 meters deep, some 8,000 m³ of water per second emptied in the narrow valley below, a total of about 160 million m³. A flood wave of 6-8 meter height roared through the river valley as far as 30 km downstream, before it diminished in the widening floodplains of the lower Eder, the Fulda and the Weser.

In the popular PC game Call of Duty, the dam is rebuilt and the player, a British Special Forces agent, must sabotage AA guns on the dam during the summer of 1944. This, however, is highly fictional, due to the fact that the dam was never attacked after 1943. Germany was already weakened after the first attack in 1943, and to the Allies, there were other, more important bombing campaigns to be carried out.

The dam was rebuilt within months by forced labor (see Organisation Todt), and the lake today is a major summertime recreational facility. It has a capacity of 199.3 million m³, which makes it the third largest reservoir in Germany.

At low water, in late summers of dry years, the remnants of three villages (Asel, Bringhausen, and Berich), along with a bridge across the original river bed, that were submerged when the lake was filled in 1914, can be seen, and descendants of people buried in the now submerged cemeteries go to visit the graves of their ancestors.

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