 In 1298, Malchow Abbey, a Cistercian nunnery, moved to the south shore of the Malchower See, opposite the island.Over several following centuries, the town expanded to the mainland in the northwest, to which the original settlement was linked by a succession of bridges, and gradually this mainland settlement came to predominate.A munitions factory of the Alfred Nobel Co. was established in Malchow in 1938, during the Nazi period, and during World War II hundreds of prisoners of war and also women and children were used as forced labor there.