Ruhr industry: smokestacks, railway and church spires, 1937
A steam train runs below twin church spires, a gas holder and cooling towers stand over the fields, and factory chimneys smoke beyond workers' houses.
A cyclist rides past a tall gas holder and slender chimneys, and squat cooling towers stand smoking behind a fence. From an embankment a steam locomotive pulls its coaches through a broad railway cutting, the twin spires of a Gothic Revival church and the chimneys of the works rising over the town beyond; plain houses stand on waste ground by a narrow-gauge track, a trestle bridge crosses the main line, and a cluster of stacks looms grey in the haze.
Coal, coke and steel from the Ruhr were the foundation of the rearmament that Hermann Göring's Four-Year Plan drove forward from 1936. In Essen colliery, steelworks, railway and workers' housing stood so close together that town and works could hardly be told apart.
