Chiefly attached to the département of the Vosges since the
Revolution, the Bruche Valley was annexed by the new German
Empire via the Treaty of Frankfurt in 1871, and then included in
the département of the Lower Rhine after the allied victory in 1918.

The scars of modern warfare can be seen all over the Bruche Valley.
Bringing widespread destruction to many villages, the First World
War left its mark all over the landscape, which is today still dotted
with shelters and other ruins from the former front line. The large
number of military cemeteries here also remind us of the sheer
intensity of the fighting which took place in these mountains. Six
of the nine national necropolises in the Vosges range can be found
in the Bruche Valley.

As the valley's fate is henceforth closely bound up with that of
Alsace as a whole, it was once again annexed by Germany in 1940,
and suffered the Nazi occupation not to mention a particularly
brutal round of “re-Germanisation”. Proof of this can be seen with
the Schirmeck Vorbruck internment and “re-education” camp,
and the Struthof concentration camp which was the only concentration camp built on French soil.