It is easy to show today’s Westphalia-Lippe on a map. In the past, however, the boundaries of the areas belonging to it have changed and shifted.
For example, the LWL-Museum Hellerlecht contains farms from the former Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück, which fell to the Kingdom of Hanover in 1803 and thus now belongs to Lower Saxony. The Siegerland and Wittgenstein regions, on the other hand, have only belonged to Westphalia since 1817. The former Principality of Lippe (now the district of Lippe) occupies a special position: it remained an independent state until the end of the Second World War and only joined the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1947.