Dortmund

Got on the tunnel, drove through.

Day one, we got all the way to Dortmund.

Alex had never been to Germany before.

So I decided to sort of take him into Dortmund city center and get some, you know, proper German food, which was pork and potatoes.

And while I was there outside, I got recognized.

I couldn't believe it.

And I think we'll save that one for nearer the end.

Yeah.

In 1943, the Ruhr was the industrial backbone of the Nazi war machine.

Factories in Essen and Dortmund and Düsseldorf were producing the steel and the munitions and the machinery that was killing Allied soldiers on multiple fronts.

Bomber Command had been going after the Ruhr for two years.

Massive raids, enormous losses on both sides, and still the factories ran.

The impetus of this remarkable movement of expansion not only carried German trade to the east and north within the Baltic Basin, but reanimated the older trade from the lower Rhine region to Flanders and England in the west.

Cologne and the Westphalian towns, the most important of which were Dortmund, Züst and Münster, had long controlled this commerce, but now began to feel the competition of the active traders of the Baltic, opening up that direct communication by sea from the Baltic to Western Europe which became the essential feature in the history of the League.

The necessity of seeking protection from the sea rovers and pirates who infested these waters during the whole period of Hanseatic supremacy, the legal customs, substantially alike in the towns of North Germany, which governed the groups of traders in the outlying trading posts, the establishment of common factories or counters, comptors, at these points, with aldermen to administer justice and to secure trading privileges for the community of German merchants, such were some of the unifying influences which preceded the gradual formation of the League.

In the century of energetic commercial development before 1350, the German merchants abroad led the way.

There also came in existence at Visby the first association of German traders abroad, which united the merchants of over thirty cities, from Cologne and Utrecht in the west to Reval in the east.

We find the Gotland association making in 1229 a treaty with a Russian prince, and securing privileges for their branch trading station at Novgorod.

According to the Skra, the bylaws of the Novgorod branch, the four aldermen of the community of Germans, who among other duties held the keys of the common chest deposited in Visby, were to be chosen from the merchants of the Gotland association and of the towns of Lübeck, Züst and Dortmund.

The Gotland association received in 1237 trading rights in England, and shortly after the middle of the century it also secured privileges in Flanders.

... what part of Germany were you born in?

Um, small town called Detmold in, like, North Rhine-Westphalia, so it's the northwest sort of close to the Dutch border between, like, Bielefeld and Dortmund, Hanover.

Like, if you made a triangle of those three cities, it's roughly in the middle there.

Um-

Okay.

It's, it's cl- close to Dortmund zone.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cologne is just thirty kilometers to the south.

Essen, Dortmund, Bonn are all within an hour's drive.

The region has a dense corporate population, automotive supply chains, energy companies, international trade exhibitions.

Messe Düsseldorf is one of the largest trade fair venues in the world.

Warstein, the city where it's based, is in a state called Rhein-Westphalia.

And one of the biggest cities in Rhein-Westphalia is Dortmund.

And I am a big Borussia Dortmund fan.

We're off.

We've won our first two games in the Bundesliga.

but this is the thing i sort of started on lorcan because of the same thing my my mrs disney mad and i was like oh a card game and disney it's like it's the perfect combination

yeah and like the house now is covered in disney like lounge flies lock on everything we've got giant cards up on the wall and stuff unfortunately can't see it because my office is set up poorly to show off my lovely collection unlike your guys but um yeah the biggest thing for us with the tournament was we were worried have enough big tournaments especially when you look out at Norway and you've got the Malmo tournament stuff like that and you're like why is no one doing this why is the UK lacking for this space so I've got to talk to Luke in Dortmund We'd been talking beforehand about things, and we came up with this idea.

Yeah,

yeah.