page_title: Rodgau
section_title: Nieder-Roden
hierarchical_section_title: Rodgau / History / Nieder-Roden
context_page_description: Rodgau is a town in the Offenbach district in the Regierungsbezirk of Darmstadt in Hesse, Germany. It lies southeast of Frankfurt am Main in the Frankfurt Rhine Main Region and has the greatest population of any municipality in the Offenbach district. It came into being in 1979 when the greater community of Rodgau was raised to town, after having been formed through a merger of five formerly self-administering communities in the framework of municipal reform in Hesse in 1977. The current constituent communities’ history reaches back to the 8th century.
context_section_description: The centre that is now Rodgau's biggest constituent community had its first documentary mention as early as 786 when the Rotaha Monastery was bequeathed to the Lorsch Abbey. The name might go back to the Siedlung auf einer gerodeten Aue (“Settlement on a cleared floodplain”), but it is also likely that it comes from the Rodau, which runs through the community, and which rises in Rotliegend near Urberach. During floods, it was once known to run red (rot in German). Whereabouts the monastery lay is to this day unknown. Finds, however, confirm that people were settling in what is now Nieder-Roden long before the Christian Era. In the Middle Ages, the surrounding woodlands belonged to the Wildbann Dreieich, a royal hunting forest, one of whose 30 Wildhuben (special estates whose owners were charged with guarding the hunting forest) was maintained in Nieder-Roden.
  Nieder-Roden had another documentary mention in 791 when the Frankish nobleman Erlulf donated all his holdings in Nieder-Roden (rotahen inferiore), Ober-Roden (rotahen superiore) and Bieber to the Lorsch Abbey. In 1346 the village became an independent parish, although in the years that followed it still remained in a certain dependency relationship with its former mother parish of Ober-Roden.
  Formerly an Eppstein holding, the place belonged from 1425 to 1803 to the Archbishopric of Mainz and enjoyed great importance as the centre of a tithing area and the seat of a tithe court. In 1803, the village, as part of the Amtsvogtei of Dieburg, ended up with the Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt, the later Grand Duchy of Hesse. When the Rödermark (a communally held parcel of land to which belonged several villages) was divided up in 1818, Nieder-Roden received a share of the forest. In 1832, Nieder-Roden passed to the Offenbach district. From 1874 to 1977, the community was in the Dieburg district. In 1896 the Rodgaubahn (railway) with a railway station in Nieder-Roden opened.
  In the Second World War, during the National Socialist régime, there arose a penal and prison camp, the Lager Rollwald (“Rollwald Camp”) on the land now occupied by the Rollwald community.
  After the war, Nieder-Roden grew, especially in the 1960s and 1970s from 2,500 inhabitants to now almost 16,000. In the course of district reform in Hesse in 1977, the community was transferred from the Dieburg district to the Offenbach district, to which the town of Rodgau also belongs.
caption: Boules and chess under planetrees in Nieder-Roden
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