Rothe Erde

Rothe Erde is a district of Aachen, Germany with large-scale development in heavy industry. It is sub-district 34 of the Aachen-Mitte Stadtbezirk (which is roughly equivalent to a city borough). It lies between the districts of Forst and Eilendorf.History and economyRothe Erde is a historically important center for the steel industry. In 1845 the Wallonian Jacques Piedboeuf, together with Hugo Jakob Talbot and the mechanical engineers Johann Leonhard Neuman and Theodor Esser, founded the steelworks OHG Piedboeuf & Co, Aachener Walz- und Hammerwerk on the site of a former estate. It remained until being taken over in 1851 by Carl Ruëtz, from which point it continued as the Kommanditgesellschaft Carl Ruëtz & Co – Aachener Hütten-Aktien-Verein Rothe Erde. Carl Ruëtz purchased the former Paulinen steelworks in Dortmund in 1861, renaming it Rothe Erde Dortmund and handing the Aachen works over to mining industrialist Adolph Kirdorf.Because there was no blast furnace in Rothe Erde in which iron ore could be smelted, Kirdorf purchased several blast furnaces in 1892, as well as several coal operations in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, which at the time belonged to the German Customs Union (Zollverein), and in Audun-le-Tiche, Lorraine, which had been part of the German Reich since 1871. He obtained coal and coke supplies from the Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG mine, where his brother Emil worked as the director of sales. Kirdorf's strategy paid off and even though by 1887 the company was first among German steelworks, having produced roughly 500,000 tons of rough steel, by 1890 this figure had risen to over a million steel ingots produced.