The Rhineland is a region of the former West Germany stretching from the banks of the Rhine to Germany's western border. The map shows the Rhine Province of Prussia as it existed from the nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century; its borders more or less match the definition of the region. Once among the most economically productive parts of Germany, today it is for the most part depopulated and lawless. Its only settlements are a few small city-states, largely under military rule. Neuss is the most prominent settlement in the north, while the south has a cluster of loosely allied settlements, of which the largest is Oberstein.
History[]
The Rhineland has been of strategic importance for centuries. Its acquisition by Prussia signaled that kingdom's rise to Great Power status. It fueled much of the industrial revolution in Prussia and the German Empire. After the First World War, it was demilitarized, and remilitarizing it was one of the first overt acts of aggression by Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union considered the Rhine to be the objective of any land invasion of the West, most notably in its simulation "Seven Days to the River Rhine" of 1979.
World War III[]
The Third World War rendered the region one of the most hostile environments on earth for human habitation. While most ground forces in West Germany were concentrated near the Inner German border, the Rhineland had a large concentration of air bases. It was also Germany's most industrialized region. These two facts meant that on Doomsday, the Soviet Union carpeted the Rhineland with nuclear attacks. Even more dangerous, in the long run, was a chain of nuclear power plants along the length of the river. In the chaos and collapse of Doomsday, nearly all of these reactors melted down, contaminating the air, water and land with radioactive material.
Soviet simulations notwithstanding, the land invasion never made it to the Rhine. Invading forces disintegrated as they tried to navigate the nuclear warzone with no central command. The only Warsaw Pact troops to approach the river came as tiny groups of desperate marauders. Surviving Nato troops were in little better condition. Guerrilla fighting continued through the starving winter of 1983-4. By the time this thawed into the unnaturally warm nuclear summer of 1984, the Rhineland had too few people still alive to fight.
Emergence of the Rhineland cities[]
In such an environment, human habitation was limited to a few small, hard settlements. They naturally came to be governed by fragments of the military - both Germans and foreign troops who were retreating from the front. The troops were still on a war footing for most of 1984, sending detachments across the Rhine to pursue what was left of the Soviet invaders. Led by Americans and West Germans, these groups distrusted the civilian government still clinging to life in Luxembourg. For the most part they ignored Luxembourgish attempts to coordinate the region and carried on the fight alone.
By the late 80s, the Rhineland's local civil governments had stopped functioning. The pockets of ex-NATO troops were the only law. In some places the soldiers governed with the cooperation of councils of citizens; in others, their leaders simply did as they pleased. By and large the emerging city-states still claimed to represent what was left of the NATO alliance; while not many original personnel were left in arms, the commanders were World War III veterans.
A rivalry grew steadily between these settlements and the Benelux Union, which now included two functioning member nations, Luxembourg and a rump Belgium. The union was bringing stability to its small zone in the west, and its growing economic and political influence was a threat to the Rhineland statelets. By the early 90s each side had denounced the other as illegitimate. The city of Trier, the most prominent surviving community in the region, became a flashpoint, with different factions aligning themselves with Benelux or with the Rhineland juntas. The two sides did not go to war, but the idea that they were still NATO allies was gone forever.
The Rhineland Alliance[]
In the 2000s, the rivalry escalated. Already in 2000, the leaders of Oberstein, near the old border between the Rhineland and Saarland, were conducting regular meetings (called Parliaments) with their immediate neighbors to discuss the threat from the west. Then in 2001 Luxembourg and Belgium combined their armed forces, and in 2003 Luxembourg organized new cantons in the hills of northeastern Saarland, incorporating for the first time a significant piece of former German territory. Both acts were seen as provocations. In 2005 the major factions formed a new defensive pact, the Rhineland Alliance.
After twenty years of growing mistrust, the former allies turned on each other. Two Belgian merchants were abducted in Trier in late 2005, prompting Benelux to send soldiers into the city. A firefight broke out, which escalated into open war. The Benelux army sent its meager force of tanks and seized the city, but Rhinelander partisans used landmines and C-4 charges to incapacitate them when they advanced further east. The rest of the war would be fought with infantry.
An Oberstein-led army launched a counteroffensive from the southeast. In a decisive battle at Nonnweiler, Benelux defenders fought it to a standstill. The Rhineland lacked the capacity to mount another offensive, and the two sides negotiated peace. Officially Trier was restored to neutrality, but Benelux was clearly the dominant force. The setback sparked a political crisis in Oberstein that ended with the execution of its American leader and, eventually, the establishment of a joint civil-military government.
The Rhineland Alliance was not dead. In 2006 its members cooperated to launch a raid against another isolated warlord state in Düren, bringing back a modest number of freed captive laborers. The attack sparked a crisis in Düren that led the bulk of its people to simply abandon the town. Many relocated further north to Neuss, which now became the most prominent community in the northern Rhineland and the center of a growing city-state.
Nevertheless, the alliance clearly had no hope of out-competing Benelux, and the setbacks only continued. In 2010, troops from the Atlantic Defense Community were first deployed to airfields in Luxembourg and Belgium; two years later Benelux became an ADC member. In 2014 the union abandoned the pretense that Trier was a neutral city and stationed troops there to better defend its eastern flank. Many in the Rhineland were outraged: this violated the agreements at the end of the 2005 war. But there was no realistic way to attack the much larger power or force it to comply. A few small raids was the extent of the war this time. In 2018 Trier joined the Benelux Union.
These failures finally broke the will to continue the alliance, and it was moribund by the 2020s. This allowed tensions to ease for the first time in decades. The new generation of leaders was more interested in Benelux as a source of trade goods than as an enemy. Nevertheless, the potential for hostility remains and the borders are still defended.
Settlements[]
This map shows the settlements of the southern Rhineland alongside the Benelux nations.
The Rhineland settlements continue in a precarious state. While foreign industrial goods are more available, the food supply is insecure and trade routes are often hazardous.
The NATO soldiers who dominated the region for years are mostly gone now, replaced by a younger generation of locally-recruited fighters. The settlements vary in their openness and degree of civil rule. Neuss and Oberstein, at either end of the region, have the most developed political systems, and their regimes respond to elections and referenda. More toward the center of the Rhineland, rule tends to belong to a closed military elite that consumes much of the surplus of the land.
- Neuss
- Düren
- Blankenheim
- Veldenz
- Oberstein
- Freisen
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