A church was built in what is today Geesthacht around the year 800. The town was first mentioned in 1216 as
Hachede, then a part of the
Duchy of Saxony. A change in the course of the Elbe cut the settlement into two:
Geesthacht and
Marschacht (in today's
Lower Saxony). In 1296, Geesthacht became part of the Duchy of
Saxe-Lauenburg, partitioned from Saxony. Duke
Eric III pawned Geesthacht - as part of the
Herrschaft of
Bergedorf - to the
Free City of Lübeck in 1370. In 1401, Duke
Eric IV retook the pawned area by force. Geesthacht was ceded as part of a condominium to the Hanseatic cities
Hamburg and Lübeck by the
Peace of Perleberg in 1420. In 1811, Geesthacht was annexed to the
First French Empire as part of the
Bouches de l'Elbe département, but the condominium was restored two years later. In the 1860s, Swedish chemist
Alfred Nobel established a
glycerin factory in Geesthacht (on Krümmel hill) and invented
dynamite, with Krümmel becoming the first dynamite factory in the world. Lübeck sold its share in the condominium to Hamburg in 1868, and Geesthacht became a part Hamburg's state territory. The
Bergedorf-Geesthachter Railway (BGE) opened in 1906. During the
Weimar Republic, Geesthacht was a hotbed of radical leftist parties (
USPD,
KPD and
SAPD) and acquired the nickname
Little Moscow. It was granted
town privileges by the Hamburg state order of 2 January 1924. The historical town center was destroyed by a fire in 1928. As part of the
Greater Hamburg Act of 1937, Geesthacht was transferred to the
Prussian
province of Schleswig-Holstein, there becoming part of the
district (
Kreis) of
Lauenburg. After the territorial reorganization in
Allied-occupied Germany in the
aftermath of World War II, the province of Schleswig-Holstein was transformed into the modern state of
Schleswig-Holstein. In 1953, passenger service on the
Bergedorf-Geesthachter Eisenbahn (a railway line) was suspended. ==Politics==