Founded in 1930, the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum – as the Leibniz Research Museum for Geo-resources – is tasked with collecting, preserving, investigating, exhibiting and teaching the material heritage of the mining industry.

This is a duty that we honour both above and below ground, whether it be here in Bochum, or regionally, nationally or even internationally. Our mission statement reads: To spread the knowledge and experience of mining. And we do all of this under one roof.

Our areas of research comprise archaeometallurgy, mining history, materials science, mining archaeology, alongside our Research Laboratory and the Montanhistorisches Dokumentationszentrum (the Mining History Document Centre, or montan.dok).

Through the four tours of our permanent exhibition – Hard Coal, Mining, Mineral Resources and Art – and with the visitor’s mine, we relate the fascination of mining in all its various guises.

• Staff: 215
• Visitors: 46,743
• Established: 1930
• Inclusion in the "Blue List” (precursor to the Leibniz Association): in 1977, since 2016 as the Leibniz Research Museum for Geo-resources
• Funding body: DMT-Gesellschaft für Lehre und Bildung mbH, Stadt Bochum
• Budget in 2021: €13.73 million – comprising:
  External funding: €1.69 million
  Government grant from the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF): €4.15 million
  Subsidy from the State of North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW): €4.24 million

Updated on: January 2022