Even General Eisenhower was there. At the end of the Second world War the American general confiscated the reserves of gold and currency which had been hidden here by the Reichsbank. The money has long since gone. The gold which can be seen here today is white: potassium salt. You can see it for yourself in the Merkers Adventure Mine in the central Werra valley. Visitors are kitted out with clothes, a helmet and a lamp and a cage takes them down 5000 metres beneath the surface. There platform lorries are standing ready to take them on a twenty kilometre underground journey. The temperature is 28 degrees, there are narrow curves and steep climbs and falls. And everywhere, salt. In the co-called „Gold Room“ you can watch an old newsreel film of Eisenhower on the big screen. In the same gallery there is a large bunker, the former interim storage room for the salt. This is now an exotic concert hall with the dimensions and acoustics of a cathedral and contains the world’s largest rotary bucket excavator below ground. More huge pieces of equipment are parked in other locations and nearby a roomy underground museum brings the old potassium mine back to life. The high point of the journey underground is the fairytale grotto full of huge salt crystals some of which are longer than one metre.

Blast hole wagons, radio-controlled caterpillars, debris removing machines and armature boring wagons are just some of the highly specialised equipment in the technical arsenal of a modern potassium mine. That said, when mining first started the blast holes were bored by hand and the men shovelled the heaps of debris by hand into the wagons. The Merkers Adventure Mine shows the changes which have taken place in potassium mining n the Werra region in the course of the last one hundred years, complete with all the equipment. If geologists had had their way none of this would have happened. They stated categorically that there was no potassium salt south of the Harz region. Wrong! The first successful drillings in 1891 launched a genuine fever for potassium salt. Saline manure was highly sought-after and as a result more and more mining shafts were driven into the earth. The farmers in the bare Rhön area suddenly found they had new neighbours – workers, merchants, chemists and mining engineers. The area boomed. In 1925 Merkers opened the largest and most modern potassium salt factory in the world. 20 years later the company hit the headlines once again when American troops discovered hoards of gold and currency hidden away by the Reichsbank here. The break-up of Germany after the Second World War bisected the Hessian and Thuringian Werra district and Merkers was allocated to the Eastern sector. The big surprise occurred in 1980 when a crystal grotto was discovered at a depth of around 800 metres. This unique natural attraction was integrated into the Adventure Mine when it opened in 1991. Mining of potassium salt at Merkers ended in 1993. Nowadays the only remaining signs of the old factory are two pithead towers, an administration building and the electricity distribution house for the power station. The rest of the works site is taken up with the production of ready-made houses, the construction of electric motors and the cutting of steel parts using state-of-the-art computer techniques. Merkers Adventure Mine expects its 1,000,000th visitor. It looks like the process of structural transformation has succeeded.