Cloppenburg

Cloppenburg is a town in Lower Saxony in north-western Germany, the capital of Cloppenburg District and part of the Oldenburg Munsterland. It lies 38 kilometres south-south-west of Oldenburg in the Weser-Ems region between Bremen and the Dutch border, close to the A1 motorway that links the Ruhr area with Bremen and Hamburg, and on the B213 federal highway, the shortest link from the Netherlands to that motorway. The town is a centre for the largely agricultural region of southern Oldenburg and the administrative seat of the district, with many schools and some industry, including connector manufacturer Lumberg and bicycle maker Derby Cycle. Its best known visitor attraction is the Cloppenburg Museum Village, an open-air museum of old regional buildings that were taken down and reassembled there. Under Nazi Germany it held a forced labour subcamp of the Vechta prison and a camp for Sinti and Romani people. The town is twinned with Bernay in France.