Ohmbach
Ohmbach is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Oberes Glantal, whose seat is in Schönenberg-Kübelberg.Geography
Location
Ohmbach stretches along the middle Ohmbach valley in the Western Palatinate between Herschweiler-Pettersheim and Brücken. Two brooks, one each side of the Ohmbach, empty into this river here. One of these, the Weitersbach, which flows from the east and also rises within Ohmbach's limits, runs through a valley that has also been built up. The mountains on the valleys’ sides reach heights of well over 300 m above sea level, with the highest being the Knechtsberg. The municipal area measures 390 ha, of which 58 ha is wooded.Neighbouring municipalities
Ohmbach borders in the northeast on the municipality of Herschweiler-Pettersheim, in the east on the municipality of Steinbach am Glan, in the south on the municipality of Brücken, in the southwest on the municipality of Dittweiler, in the west on the municipality of Altenkirchen and in the northwest on the municipality of Krottelbach. Ohmbach also meets the municipality of Frohnhofen at a single point in the northwest.Municipality’s layout
Today's village of Ohmbach grew out of two original centres bearing the names Ober-Ohmbach and Nieder-Ohmbach, the latter of which was originally named Weitersbach. Ober-Ohmbach's houses clustered around a mediaeval church in the middle of a graveyard that stood on a mountain spur, while Nieder-Ohmbach stretched out on a hill south of the Weitersbach. The two villages on each side of the through road on the brook's right bank long ago grew together. A newer residential area with a big new building zone with a fire station, a kindergarten and a playground stretches beneath a mountain slope on the Ohmbach's left bank. Here, too, stands the Catholic church, built in 1970. The sporting ground with its clubhouse likewise lies on the Ohmbach's left bank on Sportplatzstraße. The village owns two graveyards, the one in Ober-Ohmbach with its mortuary lies in the north end on Friedhofstraße, and the one in Nieder-Ohmbach is to be found on the through road south of the village.History
Antiquity
Bearing witness to early settlers in the area are prehistoric barrows within Ohmbach's own limits and also on land held by all the neighbouring municipalities. A great barrow from an unknown time lies on the heights of the Knechtenberg, but it is damaged, reportedly after having been half dug away in 1945 by the Wehrmacht. Gallo-Roman times, too, left their traces. The remnants of a villa rustica were unearthed as long ago as the 19th century. Reliefs from Roman times were built into the mediaeval churchtower. The originals of these spolia are now kept at the Historisches Museum Speyer.When the villages of Ohmbach and Weitersbach were founded is something that is now unknown. They do not appear in the Polyptique, the late-9th-century taxation register from the Abbey of Saint-Remi handed down by Guérard. This is a clue that suggests that they did not then belong to the Remigiusland. With a fair degree of certainty, they both lay within the Free Imperial Domain. Sometime after their founding, perhaps as far back as the 8th century or even earlier, their shared history was set asunder when each one found itself in a different lordly domain. Weitersbach long remained in the Reichsland, whereas Ohmbach passed as a Frankish king's donation into the ownership of the Archbishopric of Mainz sometime before 976. Ohmbach thus did not belong, as often assumed, from its founding to the Remigiusland, but rather was held, like the villages of the parish of Niederkirchen in the Oster valley, by the Archbishopric. A place named Ovenbach, mentioned in 967 in connection with the Saviour's Chapel in Frankfurt, cannot be the same place as this one in the Palatinate, for in the course of a reorganization of the bishoprics within the Archbishopric of Mainz on the Rhine’s left bank by Archbishop Willigis beginning in 976, Ohmbach passed into the ownership of Disibodenberg Abbey. Willigis raised Disibodenberg to a middle centre among Mainz holdings on the Rhine's left bank outside the city of Mainz itself. A record from the time documenting this deed has unfortunately not been preserved, but its content has reached the present day through restitution documents from 1108 and 1128. In 1112, Count Gerlach I founded the County of Veldenz and at the same time took over the Vogtei over extensive ecclesiastical landholds, among them Disibodenberg Abbey and the Remigiusland. About the middle of the 13th century, the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg was dissolved and the building complex was taken over by Cistercians from the Otterberg Monastery. It thus became possible for Count Gerlach V to buy up Disibodenberg's church property. It was in this way that Ohmbach and Niederkirchen came to the Remigiusland only quite late. Gerlach V of Veldenz bequeathed the parish of Ohmbach to the Werschweiler Monastery, under whose ownership it remained until the time of the Reformation. In 1444, the County of Veldenz met its end when Count Friedrich III of Veldenz died without a male heir. His daughter Anna wed King Ruprecht's son Count Palatine Stephan. By uniting his own Palatine holdings with the now otherwise heirless County of Veldenz – his wife had inherited the county, but not her father's title – and by redeeming the hitherto pledged County of Zweibrücken, Stephan founded a new County Palatine, as whose comital residence he chose the town of Zweibrücken: the County Palatine – later Duchy – of Palatinate-Zweibrücken, to which Ohmbach, too, belonged. Parts of the Reichsland with the village of Weitersbach in the court district of Kübelberg were acquired in 1375 by Elector Palatine Ruprecht I as an Imperial pledge. He handed the court district of Kübelberg on to the Counts of Sponheim. In 1437, however, it passed back, along with Weitersbach, to the Electorate of the Palatinate.Modern times
Even after the Middle Ages, the names Ohmbach and Weitersbach still kept cropping up in records. During the time of the Reformation, Ohmbach lay in the Duchy of Palatinate-Zweibrücken while Weitersbach belonged to the Electorate of the Palatinate. Ohmbach remained part of Zweibrücken until feudalism itself was swept away by the French Revolution. Weitersbach remained at first with the Electorate of the Palatinate. Sometime after 1600, the name Weitersbach disappeared from the historical record and was replaced with the name Nieder-Ohmbach, while the village that had hitherto been known as Ohmbach assumed the name Ober-Ohmbach. The Thirty Years' War swept over the land, which was also laid waste in French King Louis XIV's wars of conquest. At the height of the Thirty Years' War, many villagers died, not only from the war's effects, but also from the Plague. Survivors fled. The villages were revived when newcomers settled there. It must be borne in mind, though, that many of these settlers, especially the ones in the Electorate of the Palatinate lands, were instruments of Louis XIV's policy, which favoured Catholic settlers. Only in the course of the late 18th century did population figures once more begin to grow healthily, and then began emigration. In 1779, the two villages for the first time found themselves under the same lordship once Nieder-Ohmbach, along with all other villages in the hitherto Electorate of the Palatinate court district of Kübelberg, was exchanged against villages on the Nahe held by Zweibrücken. Thus, Nieder-Ohmbach experienced a brief interlude as a Zweibrücken holding, but this lasted only about a decade before the French Revolution broke out.Recent times
showed up in 1793, and in 1801, the French annexed the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank to France. Ober-Ohmbach and Nieder-Ohmbach now formed for the first time a single municipality under the name Commune d’Ohmbach, which lay in the Mairie of Konken, the Canton of Kusel, the Arrondissement of Birkenfeld and the Department of Sarre. After Napoleon’s final defeat, the Congress of Vienna drew new boundaries yet again. After a transitional time, Ohmbach was grouped into the bayerischer Rheinkreis, later known as Rheinpfalz, an exclave of the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1816, within the Landcommissariat of Kusel and the Canton of Kusel. The lowest administrative units were the Bürgermeistereien. The still united Ohmbach belonged to the Bürgermeisterei of Konken, which from 1821 to 1843 was headed by mayor Mehl from Konken. Under this mayor, the united municipality of Ohmbach was once again split in two, becoming Oberohmbach and Niederohmbach. In 1877 and 1888, attempts to reunite the two villages failed. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Nazi Party did not become quite as popular in Ohmbach as in some other places in the district. In the 1928 Reichstag elections, only 0.9% of the local votes went to Adolf Hitler’s party, but by the 1930 Reichstag elections, this had grown, albeit slightly, to 3.1%. By the time of the 1933 Reichstag elections, after Hitler had already seized power, the Nazis fared no better than 21.1% in terms of local support. Nevertheless, Hitler's overall success in these elections paved the way for his Enabling Act of 1933, thus starting the Third Reich in earnest. Only in 1936, under the Nazis, did it become possible to reunite the two villages. Ohmbach has been one municipality ever since. In 1952, a new Bürgermeisterei of Herschweiler-Pettersheim was founded, to which belonged, besides the mayoral seat, Ohmbach, Krottelbach and Langenbach. In the course of administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate, Ohmbach was grouped as an Ortsgemeinde into the Verbandsgemeinde of Schönenberg-Kübelberg in 1972.