4 – Neudietendorf

A village and a former municipality in the district of Gotha, in Thuringia, next to Erfurt. It is surprisingly interesting, although the reason that I visited the town is because I missed my train change there, we had 5 minutes for it and the previous train was 10 minutes late, so yeah. There were plenty of 9-Euro-Ticketers there, so they could've held the train to Göttingen. But I am happy that they didn't.

At the end of the war, on April 5, 1945, troops of the 3rd US Army had already reached Neudietendorf coming from the side of the Motorway. On 12th April the 80th Division staff established their quarters at the Brethren Hotel and Inn (today – Bürgerhaus). There, on the same day, US Commander-in-Chief Eisenhower met with his generals Patton and they also get the information about the death of the FDR.

Like all of Thuringia, the town was handed over to the Red Army by the US occupying power in early July 1945. Thus Neudietendorf was part of the Soviet Occupation Zone and from 1949 of the GDR. Accordingly, it participated in all associated social developments.

There is also some interesting Catholic history of this, traditionally Protestant (and the seat of the Media Center of the Protestant Church in Middle Germany) town. In the immediate vicinity of the Gottesacker of the Protestant Brüderkirche, in the Gnadenthaler Weg, stands the plain-looking, modern Catholic chapel of St. Raphael, flanked by a rectory building and the laying-out hall for the Gottesacker (no longer used as such today). After the Second World War, the Catholic Christians in the community increasingly had to suffer from a lack of space for their services, as the population of the community had increased significantly due to the immigration of refugees (I think that includes e.g. refugees from Silesia, but I am not sure). On the 1st day of Advent 1958, the pastor at the time, Rat Gullitz, was able to announce that the state permits had been obtained to convert and expand the storage room of the former Lilienthal sealing wax factory, which had been built in 1778, into a church service.

In terms of transport, Neudietendorf is located on the Neudietendorf–Ritschenhausen railway that branches off from the Thuringian Railway. There are train connections from Neudietendorf station by regional train to Eisenach, Halle, Meiningen and Ilmenau and by regional express to Würzburg, Saalfeld, Göttingen, Erfurt and Chemnitz/Zwickau. The municipality belongs to the area of the Verkehrsverbund Mittelthüringen.