Principality of Lippe

At a glance

Where did Lippe come from?

The family took its name from the River Lippe, near today's Lippstadt, where its first estates lay, south-west of the hills around Detmold. A Bernhard "de Lippe" is named in a charter of 1123 as the guardian of a canoness who gave land to the abbey of Heerse. He and his brother Hermann, first recorded in 1129, are the earliest known lords. Hermann's son Bernhard II (born around 1140) turned a minor noble house into a regional power. He succeeded his father in 1167, fought for Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, and founded two towns: Lippstadt on the river, and Lemgo, around 1190. The date of Lippstadt is disputed. Historians have argued for 1168, 1184, 1185 and 1187; Paul Leidinger makes the case for 1184, and the town itself celebrated its 800th anniversary in 1985. In 1196 Bernhard became a Cistercian monk. He ended his life as a missionary bishop in Livonia, on the eastern Baltic, and died there in 1224.

The family's lands were scattered: some round Lippstadt, the larger part east of the Teutoburg Forest round Detmold, Lemgo, Horn and Blomberg. In 1368 Simon III declared the "Dominium Lippiense" indivisible. This family law, the Pactum unionis, is also the first record of the rights of the estates, and it kept the core of the territory together until the divisions of the seventeenth century. The family's original arms were a red five-petalled rose on silver. The rose still appears today in the arms of the district of Lippe and in those of North Rhine-Westphalia.

When did the lords of Lippe become counts?

In 1528. Simon V took the title of count (Graf), on the strength of the counties of Sternberg and Schwalenberg that his family had acquired. According to Johannes Arndt, the leading modern historian of the territory, the lords "assumed" the title: no imperial grant survives. From then on Lippe sat with the imperial counts, a small but self-governing member of the Holy Roman Empire, holding its land in its own right rather than as a fief of the Empire. A feudal tie to the Empire was imposed only once, by force: after the Protestant defeat at Mühlberg in 1547, Lippe was treated as enemy territory, had to pay contributions of 10,000 and then 8,000 thalers, and had to take the county as an imperial fief.

The Reformation came from the towns. Lemgo adopted a Protestant church order in 1533, and in 1537 the young Bernhard VIII gave the Lutheran movement his formal blessing at the diet of Cappel. A Lutheran church order for the whole county followed in 1538.

Why did Lippe turn Calvinist?

Because its ruler did. Simon VI (1554–1613), the most ambitious of the counts, sat on the Emperor's Aulic Council (Reichshofrat) under Rudolf II, served as an imperial envoy in the Netherlands, collected art and scientific instruments, and owned a library of about 3,000 volumes. In 1587 he moved his court from Detmold to the castle of Brake outside Lemgo. From 1601 Reformed services were held at his court, and on 2 June 1605 he and his family took communion in the Reformed manner in the Marktkirche at Detmold. The Lippe church calls this the official change of confession. Arndt calls it an administrative change of confession, a "revolution from above": Lutheran pastors were replaced by Reformed ones, rather than the people changing their minds.

Lemgo refused. It was the largest and richest town in the county and claimed wide political and religious autonomy. In 1609 a citizens' uprising, the "Lemgo revolt", stopped the new confession being imposed, and in the Röhrentrup Recess of 1617 the town secured the right to remain Lutheran, with wide powers of self-government. Lippe has had two Protestant confessions side by side ever since.

Simon VI died at Brake in December 1613, leaving debts that the Neue Deutsche Biographie puts at 800,000 thalers. His son Simon VII moved the residence back to Detmold, which has been the capital ever since.

What happened in the Lemgo witch trials?

The same urban autonomy that protected Lemgo's Lutheranism also gave its council the right to try capital cases. Scheffler counts Lippe among the core zones of witch persecution in Germany, and Lemgo was its centre. Jürgen Scheffler, who has studied the surviving files, counts two great waves:

• 1628–1637: at least 110 people were accused and at least 84 executed.
• 1653–1681: the second wave was larger. Its driving force was Hermann Cothmann, who was elected director of the witch trials on 16 January 1666 and became burgomaster of Lemgo in 1667. His own mother, Catharina Goehausen, had been executed as a witch in 1654.

On the evidence of about 200 surviving trial records, Scheffler estimates a total of about 250 victims, more than half of them after 1653, and notes that the real figure was probably higher. The persecution ended after 1681, when Maria Rampendahl was banished after a witch trial and, through her husband, took the town and the count's government to the Imperial Chamber Court.

The Renaissance house in Lemgo's Breite Strasse that Cothmann's parents bought in 1625 is known today as the Hexenbürgermeisterhaus, the "witch-burgomaster's house". The name only arose in nineteenth-century oral tradition. The house is now one of Lemgo's town museums.

Lemgo was also hit hard by the Thirty Years' War. The town was plundered twice, in 1636 and 1646, and by the end of the war only a little over half of its roughly 1,000 houses were still standing. Simon VII tried to keep the county neutral, but it was not spared billeting and the other burdens of the war.

How was Lippe divided, and what is Schaumburg-Lippe?

Simon VI's will of 1597 gave his younger sons districts of their own, known as Paragium lands. They drew the revenues and held lower jurisdiction there, but not sovereignty. This created cadet lines whose claims kept the Detmold government busy for two centuries:

The most important is Schaumburg-Lippe. When the counts of Holstein-Schaumburg died out in 1640, their county was divided. After long negotiations, Philipp zur Lippe-Alverdissen obtained a share in 1647 by agreement with Hesse-Kassel, and the name "Schaumburg-Lippe" grew out of "County of Schaumburg, Lippe share". Schaumburg-Lippe became a separate state with its own princes and is a frequent source of confusion: it lay to the north, round Bückeburg, and its history ran separately from Lippe's, although from 1933 both were placed under the same Nazi governor. Disputes between the two houses over districts such as Blomberg and Schieder ran into the nineteenth century: Schieder returned to Lippe in 1789, Blomberg only in the nineteenth century.

When did Lippe become a principality?

Lippe became a principality in two steps, and dates of 1720, 1789 and 1807 can all be found in the sources.

1. 1720: granted, not taken up. Emperor Charles VI granted Count Simon Henrich Adolf the princely rank on 27 October 1720. The count could not pay the chancery fees: according to Hans Kiewning, who studied the files in 1903, 5,773 florins remained unpaid even after half the tax was waived, and in March 1721 the count asked for the acceptance to be postponed. He never used the title.
2. 1789: the ruler becomes a prince. Count Leopold took up the government on 4 September 1789 after the Emperor had declared him of age. The princely diploma was issued in Vienna on 5 November 1789, and Leopold became Fürst zur Lippe. He had complained that, after so many promotions of other families, a count's title hardly counted for more than an ordinary noble "von".
3. 1807: the territory becomes a principality. In Arndt's words, the 1789 diploma did not raise the territory itself into a principality. Only Napoleon's admission of Lippe to the Confederation of the Rhine in April 1807 gave the county the status it wanted, and at no cost.

Leopold I was soon declared unable to govern because of mental illness, and from December 1790 the county was run by a guardianship government until he was given back his powers in 1795. He died on 4 April 1802.

Who was Princess Pauline?

Pauline of Anhalt-Bernburg (1769–1820), Leopold's widow, governed Lippe as regent for her young son Leopold II from 1802 to 1820. She formally took over the regency on 18 May 1802.

Her greatest achievement was keeping Lippe on the map. When Napoleon reorganised Germany in 1806, many small territories round Lippe were swallowed by larger neighbours. Pauline wrote to Napoleon on 20 November 1806 asking to join his new Confederation of the Rhine. The accession treaty for Lippe and Schaumburg-Lippe was signed in Warsaw on 18 April 1807 by Talleyrand and Baron von Gagern, ratified by Napoleon on 30 April and received in Detmold on 4 May. Lippe-Detmold had to supply 500 of the two states' 650 soldiers. The price was high: of about 1,000 Lippe men sent to fight in Spain, Arndt notes, only 96 came home. At the end of 1807 Pauline travelled to Paris herself to plead Lippe's case with Napoleon and his ministers.

At home she reformed by decree:

• 1802: a day nursery for small children in Detmold, a Kinderbewahranstalt. It is often called the first in Germany, but it was a care institution, not a kindergarten in Friedrich Fröbel's later sense.
• 1808: an ordinance abolishing personal serfdom (Leibeigenschaft). At the time 4,194 of Lippe's 5,709 peasant holdings were in serfdom to the princely house, so the reform mainly affected her own domains. Peasants of noble landlords, about a tenth of the total, were freed only in 1812.
• 1811: an asylum for the mentally ill at Brake.
• 1819: a written constitution, signed on 8 June and published on 26 June, which gave the peasants seats beside the knights and the towns.

The constitution did not last. The knights and towns protested to the German Confederation, which Lippe had joined in 1815, and after the Federal Diet discussed the case on 9 September 1819 the government was asked to suspend it. Lemgo, at least, was on Pauline's side: on 6 January 1818 the town elected her its first female burgomaster, for six years. Recent historians are less admiring than her older biographers. Tobias Arand, writing for the Westphalian history portal, calls her government "thoroughly autocratic" despite her closeness to her subjects: after the estates refused her a brandy tax in 1805, she hardly called them again. She handed over to Leopold II on 3 July 1820 and died on 29 December that year.

How did Lippe survive in the nineteenth century?

By choosing its protectors well. In the German Confederation, Lippe shared one vote in the inner council (the 16th curia) with Hohenzollern, Liechtenstein, Reuss, Schaumburg-Lippe and Waldeck. It joined the Prussian-led Zollverein customs union in 1842.

Constitutionally it went back and forth:

• 6 July 1836: a compromise constitution with 21 members of the diet, seven from the knights and fourteen for the towns and countryside.
• 9 March 1848: under pressure from petitions, Leopold II promised public sessions and budget rights.
• 11 June 1849: the first Lippe diet elected by universal, equal and direct male suffrage met.
• 15 March 1853: Leopold III restored the 1836 constitution by decree.

In 1866 Lippe sided with Prussia. On 18 August 1866 it signed the alliance that became the North German Confederation, and a military convention, in force from 1 October 1867, dissolved its own battalion into the Prussian army. Under the constitutions of 1867 and 1871 Lippe remained a member state with its own prince, with one vote in the Bundesrat (one of 58 in the German Empire) and one Reichstag constituency. Unlike Hanover, it was never annexed by Prussia.

Who were the Lippe brickmakers?

Lippe's best-known export in the nineteenth century was its men. Every spring a large part of the male workforce left to make bricks elsewhere: in East Frisia, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, the Ruhr, Berlin and as far away as Denmark and East Prussia. They set off in March and April and came back from the end of September. Most were hired by a recruiting agent, the Ziegelbote, and worked in teams under a master brickmaker, sharing the risk and the profit.

The numbers grew late. According to the Westphalian history portal (LWL), only 248 men went in 1781, 1,408 in 1836 and 2,499 in 1850. The peak was 14,227 in 1910. Figures compiled by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam put the maximum at about 14,000 around 1900. In the nineteenth century up to 40 per cent of all working men left the principality each spring. Even in 1923 about 7,000 still went. The passport lists and agents' registers survive in the state archive in Detmold and are searchable online.

What is the Hermann Monument?

The Hermann Monument (Hermannsdenkmal) stands on the Grotenburg hill above Detmold. It commemorates Arminius, or "Hermann", the Cheruscan leader who destroyed a Roman army under Publius Quinctilius Varus in AD 9. Its sculptor, Ernst von Bandel (1800–1876), spent most of his life and all his private fortune on it. Work on the base began in 1838, and the vault of the foundation stone was closed with a ceremony on 8 September 1841. The project then stalled for decades for lack of money and after quarrels between Bandel and the supporters' association.

Prussia's interest revived it: King Wilhelm I visited Bandel's workshop in 1869, and after 1871 the new national mood carried the project. According to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, the Reichstag voted 10,000 thalers, and Wilhelm I, by then Emperor, added 9,000 in 1874. The monument was inaugurated on 16 August 1875 in the presence of Wilhelm I and cost 90,000 thalers in total. It is 53.46 m high: a 26.89 m base and a 26.57 m copper figure up to the tip of the raised sword, which alone is 7 m long.

The site was chosen because, as the LWL puts it, people at the time "still mistakenly believed" that the battle had been fought there. Where it actually took place is still debated. Later the monument served as a backdrop for nationalist rallies. In the 1933 election campaign, a Nazi poster showed it in front of a swastika rising like the sun, with the slogan "Macht frei das Hermannsland!" ("Free Hermann's land!").

What was the Lippe succession dispute?

Between 1895 and 1905 the question of who should inherit one of Germany's smallest thrones became a national affair that drew in the Emperor, the Bundesrat and two courts of arbitration.

The senior line was dying out. When Prince Woldemar died on 20 March 1895, the heir was his brother Alexander, who had been in an asylum since 1872. Woldemar had secretly named Prince Adolf of Schaumburg-Lippe as regent. Adolf had married Viktoria of Prussia, the sister of Emperor Wilhelm II, in 1890. The rival claimants were the counts of Lippe-Biesterfeld, the senior cadet line. Their claim was challenged because Count Wilhelm Ernst zur Lippe-Biesterfeld had married Modeste von Unruh, from an untitled noble family: were their descendants of "equal birth" (ebenbürtig)?

• 23 April 1895: the Lippe diet accepted Adolf as interim regent by 15 votes to 6.
• 22 June 1897: a court of arbitration in Dresden, chaired by King Albert of Saxony with six judges of the Reichsgericht, ruled for Count Ernst zur Lippe-Biesterfeld. It held that Modeste's descent from an "old noble" family was enough. Ernst entered Detmold as regent on 17 July 1897.
• 1898: when Ernst complained to the Emperor that he was being denied military honours, Wilhelm II telegraphed back, as quoted in Lippe's regional encyclopedia: "Dem Regenten, was dem Regenten zukommt, weiter nichts" ("To the regent what is due to the regent, nothing more"). He added that he would not tolerate the tone of Ernst's letter.
• 26 September 1904: Ernst died, and his son Leopold took over as regent. Wilhelm II refused to recognise him.
• 13 January 1905: Prince Alexander died.
• 25 October 1905: a second arbitral award, by two civil senates of the Reichsgericht in Leipzig, recognised the whole Biesterfeld line. Leopold became Prince Leopold IV.

How did the monarchy end in 1918?

Peacefully. On 9 November 1918, the day revolution reached Berlin, Leopold IV signed a proclamation "An mein geliebtes Volk!" ("To my beloved people!"), printed in the state gazette on 11 November. It was a conditional offer, not an abdication:

"Wenn die berufene Landesvertretung glaubt, von meinem und meines Hauses Verzicht auf den Thron Heil und Segen für Volk und Land erwarten zu müssen, erkläre ich mich tiefbewegten Herzens zu solchem Verzicht bereit."

("If the appointed representatives of the land believe that they must expect welfare and blessing for people and land from my and my house's renunciation of the throne, I declare myself, with a deeply moved heart, ready for such a renunciation.")

On 12 November 1918 Leopold renounced the throne, and the deed was handed to the new people's and soldiers' council (Volks- und Soldatenrat). The Detmold city archive describes how Social Democrats carried the revolution to Detmold. In Lippe it remained peaceful. Under the settlement that followed, the family kept the right to live in Detmold castle, which it still owns.

What was the Free State of Lippe?

The democratic successor state. A diet elected on 26 January 1919 gave the Social Democrats 11 of 21 seats. Among the members was Auguste Bracht, a laundry seamstress from Oerlinghausen and the only woman. The constitution of 21 December 1920 begins: "Das Land Lippe ist ein selbständiger Freistaat im Verbande des Deutschen Reiches" ("The Land of Lippe is an independent Free State within the German Reich"). The state was governed by a three-member presidium. From 1920 to 1933 it was led by the Social Democrat Heinrich Drake. With 1,215 km² and about 164,000 inhabitants, Lippe was one of the smallest states of the Weimar Republic.

Why did the Lippe election of January 1933 matter?

Because the Nazi leadership made it a test. After losing votes in the Reichstag election of November 1932, the NSDAP was in crisis, and Gregor Strasser's break with Hitler threatened to split the party. Goebbels wrote in his diary on 13 January 1933: "Alles hängt nun von Lippe ab" ("Everything now depends on Lippe"). Hitler spoke at 16 events in the little state between 4 and 14 January, a campaign mocked at the time as "Hitler goes to the villages".

The NSDAP became the largest party, and Nazi propaganda celebrated a breakthrough. The numbers were less impressive. The party gained 4.7 points on November 1932 but stayed 1.6 points below its July 1932 result in Lippe, and the SPD gained votes too. Lippe's voters were 0.26 per cent of the German electorate. Historians agree that the result had, in the words of the LWL's account, "objectively hardly any influence on the political decisions". Hitler's appointment as chancellor on 30 January came from the intrigues around President Hindenburg. The election mattered mainly inside the party, for morale and in the fight with Strasser.

What happened to Lippe under the Nazis?

On 7 February 1933 a Nazi-led government under Ernst Krappe took over, and Drake was out of office. The diet was reformed on the Reich election results, and on 21 June 1933 the remaining members passed an enabling act that handed its legislative powers to the government. It never met again. From 16 May 1933 Alfred Meyer, Gauleiter of Westphalia-North, was Reich Governor (Reichsstatthalter) for Lippe and Schaumburg-Lippe. Meyer later took part in the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. By the Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich of 30 January 1934, Lippe, like every other German state in Nazi Germany, lost its sovereign rights.

The Nazis also took over Lippe's landscape. The amateur researcher Wilhelm Teudt claimed that the Externsteine, a group of sandstone rocks near Horn with a twelfth-century relief of the Deposition from the Cross, had been a Germanic sanctuary. He won over Heinrich Himmler, and extensive excavations followed. According to the historian Roland Linde, they produced no proof that the rocks had been a cult site before the tenth or eleventh century. The Landesverband Lippe, which manages the site today, states that it was abused for inhuman propaganda in the Nazi period.

How did Lippe become part of North Rhine-Westphalia?

The British occupation authorities revived Lippe in 1945 and put Heinrich Drake back at its head. In a proclamation of 18 April 1945 he announced that the administration had been at a standstill for almost two weeks and was now under the control of the Allied military government. But a state this small had no future on its own. The government in Hanover wanted Lippe in the new Land of Lower Saxony, which Schaumburg-Lippe joined in 1946; North Rhine-Westphalia wanted it too.

Drake negotiated terms with North Rhine-Westphalia. The NRW cabinet adopted the guidelines on 5 December 1946, and the document known as the Lippische Punktationen is dated 17 January 1947. Its 16 points promised, among other things, that "every possible consideration" would be given to Lippe's 800-year history, that Detmold was intended as the seat of a government district, that Lippe's theatre, library, museum and archive would be preserved, and that the state's property would remain with the region.

British Military Government Ordinance No. 77 then took effect on 21 January 1947: "Land Lippe shall cease to exist as a separate Land and shall become part of Land Nord Rhein-Westfalen." Its preamble reserved a possible reorganisation after a referendum to be held within five years. The North Rhine-Westphalian law of 5 November 1948 confirmed the union with effect from 21 January 1947, and a second law of the same day created the Landesverband Lippe. This regional association has administered the former state's property since 1949, including its forests, the Hermann Monument and the Externsteine.

Whether the Punktationen are binding was later fought out in court. On 28 July 1955 the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that they were "not a legally binding state treaty", but kept "great importance as a solemn promise". The referendum foreseen by the British was planned for 1951 and then dropped, after Lippe's representatives showed no interest in a vote that would not be binding. Lippe never held one. The 1975 referendum on restoring an old state was in Schaumburg-Lippe.

Who are the House of Lippe today?

The former ruling family still lives in the Residenzschloss in Detmold, part of which is open to visitors. Leopold IV died in 1949. His youngest son, Armin Prinz zur Lippe (1924–2015), inherited under his will and headed the house for more than six decades. Armin's son Stephan Prinz zur Lippe has led it since 2015.

The best-known member of the wider family was Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld (1911–2004), son of Leopold IV's brother Bernhard. He married Princess Juliana of the Netherlands on 7 January 1937 and was prince consort while she was queen (1948–1980). His membership of the Nazi party, which he denied to the end ("I never had a membership card", he told de Volkskrant before his death), had been documented from copies since 1996. In October 2023 Flip Maarschalkerweerd, a former director of the Dutch Royal House Archive, revealed that he had found Bernhard's original NSDAP membership card in the prince's own papers, and the royal household confirmed that it was genuine.

Rulers of Lippe

Only the more important rulers before 1718 are listed. Dates of the early lords are approximate; for Simon III and Bernhard VII only the year of death is given, because the start of their rule is recorded differently in different sources.

Common myths about Lippe

Timeline of Lippe

What the map shows next

Our map draws Lippe from 1806 to 1870. Those dates come from the border data, which samples borders at fixed dates. They are not the dates of Lippe's history, which began in the twelfth century and continued as a state until 1947. At 1812 Lippe is one of the small members of Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine, beside the much larger Kingdom of Westphalia. At 1838 on the map it sits on the edge of the Prussian province of Westphalia, and at 1839 it is a member of the German Confederation. After 1870 the border data no longer draws Lippe separately: at 1895 the map shows the German Empire as a whole, although Lippe remained a member state with its own prince until 1918, and at 1928 the Weimar Republic. Waldeck, another small principality to the south, followed a similar path through the nineteenth century.