I was curious about this so I opened google earth, panned over to Germany and zoomed in on a random brown patch on the satellite imagery. The environmental devastation is absolutely awe inspiring. They have mines around the country but particularly south of Berlin, the earth is scarred with dozens of massive active and refilled mines. That group of mines also continues into Czechia and a number of refilled mines can be seen on the Polish border as well.

This seems backwards. Brown coal is much more polluting than black coal.

They are rerouting a highway(A2) to dig new lignite mines..

Ok, we've added "hard" to the title above.