The port | History The former Hanseatic city of Braunschweig had already been striving for centuries to improve its traffic situation by making the Oker and Aller navigable up to the Weser. As early as the year 1000, and probably even earlier, there was a storage and transshipment point on the Oker in what would become the center of the city of Braunschweig. In 1227, unhindered shipping between Braunschweig and Bremen was mentioned in a document. After remarkable initial successes, however, it gradually had to be abandoned in 1764 due to domestic difficulties and the increasing silting of the rivers. It is therefore obvious that in Braunschweig in particular, at the turn of the last century, there was a great deal of interest in the highly controversial Mittelland Canal as the artificial cross-connection between the Rhine, Weser and Elbe. The construction of the Mittelland Canal enabled the city of Braunschweig to become a port city again in 1934. In the north of the city, at the current intersection of the Mittelland Canal and the Berlin-Dortmund motorway, a port facility with a harbor basin was built between 1930 and 1933. In order to accommodate the growing size of ships, two parallel ports of 20 m wide, 4 m deep and 300 and 100 m long respectively were built in the 1970s. Until reunification in 1990, the port of Braunschweig was a border port. In 2001, a parallel port was extended to its current length. A modern container terminal with 38,000 m2 of paved area was built here. Until the Mittelland Canal near Magdeburg was completed in 1938, shipping traffic from Braunschweig was only directed westwards. After the collapse in 1945, difficult years followed for the port of Braunschweig, even though it was spared the effects of the war. From 1964, the Mittelland Canal was expanded to accommodate large motorized freight vessels. The construction, which began in Dortmund in 1905, was completed with the commissioning of the Elbe crossing at the Magdeburg waterway junction in 2004.
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