Hal Jespersen's Heart of Germany Tour, October 2024
This is my (Hal’s) report on my trip to Germany for a tour highlighting interesting World War II sites, “Heart of Germany.” The tour was arranged by Valor Tours, a military history travel company based in Sausalito, California. It is my second tour with Valor, the first being Operation Dragoon.
Since this report is rather long with a lot of photographs, it is broken into three parts:
- Munich, Berchtesgaden, Dachau, Nuremberg, Buchenwald (this page)
- Panzer Museum, Bergen-Belsen
- Bremen, Hamburg, Peenemünde, Sachsenhausen, Berlin, Torgau, Seelow
Friday/Saturday, October 11/12 — to Munich
I flew United Airlines direct from San Francisco to Munich, a very comfortable flight. I arranged a car from Welcome Pickups for the lengthy ride downtown. It is possible to get a much cheaper S-Bahn regional train from the airport, but I did not feel like schlepping my bag through multiple subway stations. I checked into our group hotel, the Hotel Europa, which is a little out-of-the-way from the tourist areas, but quite comfortable. It was nice that they had my room available as early as 11 AM.
I had the afternoon to kill, so I decided on the Deutsches Museum, which is a modern science and technology museum on a small island in the Isar River. It claims to be the largest such museum in the world, but I think that claim is somewhat tenuous. It was pretty convenient to travel via the U-Bahn subway. I had mixed reactions to the museum. It was quite disorganized in terms of floor layout and rather difficult to navigate, a situation not helped by the elevator being out of order. Some exhibits were rather technical and theoretical, such as details about the nature of light, but others were little more than pieces of equipment lined up. Still others were experiment workshops that were oriented to children. It was nice that everything was bilingual German/English and the signage was excellent.
Some of the areas that caught my attention: light theory and lasers; nanotechnology; modern aviation, which included an interesting A300 engine and wing cutaway, but mostly unremarkable civil aircraft and a Luftwaffe-branded F104; motors, including steam and internal combustion; wind turbines; a railroad section that was primarily a very large model railroad; robots; bridging and water engineering; radioactivity and quantum mechanics; historic aviation, which was a lot better than the modern, including a very large Junkers Ju 52 cargo/passenger plane, Messerschmidt Bf 109 E3 fighter, Me 262 jet, and Me 163 B Komet rocket plane.
The space technology section was pretty interesting, although there’s an embarrassing subtext that Germany doesn’t really have a prominent role in space. They had a little exhibit about Wernher von Braun in which they denigrated his technical contributions to the V2 effort and showed a picture of him posing happily with SS officers. The printing technology section had a number of interesting large presses and linotype machines. The cryptography section was once again sad, because they had to play up how important Bletchley Park was in breaking the German codes. There were also exhibits on photography, the movies, semiconductor manufacturing, mathematics, and farming.
I met our group in the hotel lobby. There are nine guests, our host Bob Kozlowski, a Munich-based American expat guide named Colinne Bartel, and our Dutch bus driver Jup (yoop, or Joe, as he advidsed the Americans to call him). I was expecting an introductory session that would describe the agenda and allow us to get to know each other, but instead we walked four or five blocks to the Löwenbräukeller, the flagship restaurant and beer hall of the famous brewery. Some folks seemed uneasy patronizing a restaurant that was the favorite of the local SS troops, but I figured they were all dead by now. The Jewish owner fled from Germany after Reichskristallnacht and started the Rheingold brand in New York. I was amazed that the menu we were given was printed in five languages, but none of them were German! (I later saw the regular German menu.) I had a delicious plate of four small bratwursts with sauerkraut and horseradish. On the way back to the hotel we carefully tried to avoid the bicycle lanes, which in Munich take up half of the sidewalk instead of part of the street, and the cyclists ride pretty fast, nearby pedestrians be darned.
Sunday, October 13 — Berchtesgaden
We boarded a 16-passenger center-aisle van for the two-hour drive to Berchtesgaden. The van has an unusual arrangement with two tables and three seats facing backward. We climbed up into the mountains a ways and then boarded a big electric bus that ascended 800 m surprisingly fast to the Kehlsteinhaus (“Eagles Nest”). Unfortunately it was raining, so there wasn’t much scenery to enjoy from the terrace. There’s a precarious stone staircase that goes higher to a small peak but I didn’t risk it in the rain. Inside the building, the Tea Room where party and foreign dignitaries met, is now mostly a busy restaurant, where we snacked. This site, Obersalzberg, is sometimes billed as the second most important location in the Reich, but a sign there indicated that Hitler himself rarely visited the Eagle’s Nest.
All of the other Nazi-related buildings down in lower areas—including Hitler’s house, the Berghof—were purposefully demolished in the 1950s to avoid Obersalzberg becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site. Now this residential area has been replaced by a new museum, the Dokumentationzentrum, which documents many of the Nazi crimes before and during the war. We took a 40-minute audio tour, which was very informative and well prepared. The museum is really professionally done and English captions are equal to the German text. Lots of maps and photos. Underneath the main exhibit hall is a small portion of the massive bunker tunnel complex and I’m happy to see that the Nazis built with adequate headroom for tall guys. We stopped briefly at an old hotel, the Zum Türken, which was built long before the war and was used to house SS security guys. Nearby is an entrance to the bunker system feeding into the old Berghof; some of the guys hiked into the woods to see it, but it looked muddy, so I demurred.
After our return to Munich, we had an unhosted dinner at Löwenbräukeller again. There aren’t very many restaurants in the area of our hotel, particularly on a Sunday night.
Monday, October 14 — Dachau and Munich
We drove about a half hour (11 miles) north to the town of Dachau. At JFK Platz we walked on a sidewalk that was the former railroad track into the concentration camp. There is a section that is perhaps 10 yards long that has been retained from the original track, because this is the area in which the famous Todeszug (death train) stopped. On April 29, 1945, 55 rail cars transporting prisoners from Buchenwald stopped here and only about 800 of the more than 3200 passengers survived. This area is next to the Bavarian state riot police (SWAT Team) barracks and for some reason photography was strictly prohibited. Nearby was the Dachau KL (Konzentration Lager) Memorial. Colinne, our guide for the day, showed us a large map she had printed from the memorial that displayed all the concentration camps and their subsidiary camps across Europe. Dachau was the first concentration camp, opened in March 1933 to imprison political opponents of the Nazis (primarily communists and social democrats at that time).
Visiting the memorial is a very sobering, emotional experience. There are a number of buildings from the original camp that are still there, although the 34 barracks buildings are mostly just foundations; two have been re-created to the original specifications as exhibits. All of the displays are top-notch and are bilingual German/English. Colinne give us an excellent personal tour, but I wished we had another hour or so to examine the exhibits in more detail. As it was, we spent two and a half hours, but three would have been more realistic. We stopped in the rollcall yard and went through the administration building, where Colinne explained the degrading and violent input process in uncomfortable detail. In the replica barracks building, we saw inhumane crowding—some rooms that were designed for 50 prisoners were packed with 350–500 toward the end of the war.
We walked along through all the foundations of the barracks buildings and reached some memorials erected by the religions of Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism. There was also a Soviet Union memorial, but we did not get close enough to take a look. We went through the two crematory buildings, the original small one and the larger scale later one ordered up by Himmler. We also went through a gas chamber which was for some reason actually never used here at Dachau. We saw the electric fences and trenches that were used to keep prisoners from escaping. On one side they probably would not have attempted it because it adjoined an SS training ground (which is where those riot police are currently stationed). Finally we walked on a memorial path through the woods and saw where prisoners were executed on a pistol range. (Of course, there were many executions and lots more deaths by starvation and disease.)
We drove back into Munich and stopped at the famous Hofbräuhaus, visiting the room in which Adolf Hitler first encountered the workers party that became the Nazis. We were set loose for lunch; some ate at the Hofbräuhaus, which was a frantically busy, noisy beer hall with an oompah band, but after two heavy meals at the Löwenbräukeller, I opted for a quick bite at a nearby hot dog and pommes frites shop. Then we started a bus tour of some Munich sites. We passed by a couple of restaurants frequented by Hitler. I didn’t catch the name of one, but another favorite was the Osteria Italiana. We made a brief stop at a music and theater school, which was Hitler’s headquarters in Munich, where on the second floor the infamous 1938 Munich agreement was signed by Chamberlain. This very large building was over an enormous cellar in which stolen art work was recovered in the final days of the war, as depicted in the movie Monuments Men.
We visited a parade ground, Königsplatz, that was also the site of a large book burning ceremony. We passed the America House, which had one time housed the publisher of Mein Kampf. We passed the Bavarian state bank, which was previously the headquarters of the local Gestapo, and the Deutsches Museum, which was of interest here because it was the site in which many propaganda films were viewed by the party leaders. It would’ve been nice to see the Bürgerbräukeller, the site of Hitler's failed November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, but the building no longer exists.
Then we started a walking tour. We visited an open square called Alter Hof and Colinne showed us Hitler’s youthful painting of the buildings, one of his favorite scenes. We passed by the Törbräu Hotel, used for a number of party meetings. An office building with a second-story balcony was the site of the first party office, a one-room affair. The Weisses Bräuhaus was a frequent SS hangout. Near the famous Marienplatz we stopped at a dance hall next to the Rathaus (City Hall), which was the site at which the Nuremberg laws and Reichskristallnacht programs were announced to the party faithful. Then we walked to the square in which the Nazis fought the police in conjunction with the putsch, as well as a small street nicknamed Dodgers’ Alley, where citizens who did not wish to demonstrate the Nazi salute bypassed the oncoming Nazi crowd.
We finished up in Marienplatz, the historic and cultural center of Munich. I had hoped to video the famous glockenspiel at 6 PM, but it is only run a few times a day and 5 PM was the latest. It was a long but very productive day. Some of the group went to the hotel restaurant, but I chose to visit a grocery store down the street for a sandwich and some Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir, from my old stomping ground of the Palatinate, Rheinland–Pfalz) to consume in my room and get ready for an early checkout and departure tomorrow morning.
Tuesday, October 15 — Nuremberg
On the two+ hour drive to Nuremberg, we discussed various options for rejiggering our schedule. It seems that insufficient thought was given to driving times and our original itinerary for Wednesday was way too ambitious. Today will be okay, although our visit to the Nuremberg court rooms will be bumped to tomorrow morning (because someone neglected to make a group reservation and it turned out that it was closed on Tuesday anyway). Later tomorrow we will be skipping Leipzig’s Altenburg Luftwaffe Field and Museum and in Nordhausen, the Dora camp where V2s were manufactured underground. Too bad, but it would have been a brutal day of bus riding.
Our major visit in Nuremberg was to the Nazi Party Rally Grounds. We walked inside the huge Kongresshalle, which was intended to host 100,000 party members for meetings and events, but it was unfinished during the war and is currently being restored to some extent. (It is obviously controversial and some wanted it demolished or turned into a shopping mall.) It is a massive stone structure that is reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum, but with one end of the oval open and anchored by two large buildings. The first houses the local symphony orchestra and the second is another Dokumentationszentrum, which is the German euphemism for exhibits and records about the crimes of national socialism. Colinne our guide said that a number of cities have them now.
We walked over to see the Große Straße (Great Road), a stretch of large stone blocks 60 m wide and 2000 m long (although only 1500 were completed). This was used for large marches into the stadium and the steel-toed goose stepping could be heard from a long distance. Then we visited the Zeppelinfeld/-tribüne, the large open stadium that appears in Leni Reifenstal’s Triumph of the Will. It’s in pretty bad shape. The US blew up a long row of tall columns and the Nazi symbols on top, and of course everything degrades with time. We stood on the podium where Hitler reviewed his troops and took a group photo.
In downtown Nuremberg we visited the Historischer Kunstbunker, fortified tunnels where the Germans hid their precious artwork (not the infamous stolen/looted artwork from conquered countries) like church stained glass and imperial Crown Jewels. The tunnels and photos of jewels were not all that compelling, but our tour guide lady had very interesting stories to tell about her mother as a refugee, the German peoples’ relationship to the Nazi party, and the reconstruction of the town, which was 91% destroyed in Allied bombing. I was interested to hear that Nuremberg was the manufacturing home of the famous Panther tank. In the little square above the bunker stands the Albrecht Dürer house from 1420. We did not go in, but it was an interesting fortified timber design.
We had lunch in a well-regarded bratwurst restaurant and then wandered around the main square. There was sort of a farmers market going on and I bought some delicious lebkuchen and had a cup of glühwein. Then we went to a large shopping center. One of our guests had his luggage delayed by the airline and he needed to buy some essentials. (Actually, three guests had delayed luggage but by this time two of them had arrived.) Our hotel is quite a bit out of town, the H+ hotel, which disappointed us by having no restaurant. Since we happened to eat lunch late, I was not particularly hungry and subsisted on my lebkuchen.
Wednesday, October 16 — Nuremberg Trials, Buchenwald, Kassel
We got into the first opening of the Palace of Justice and did a self-tour of Nuremberg trials. Court Room 600 is where the trial happened, although its appearance has changed a lot since 1945–46. The US Army spent $6M configuring the space for the complicated trial, but the Bavarian government reversed all those mods in the 50s. Nevertheless, you can feel the hand of history pressing down on you as you sit there. A museum is upstairs that is quite thorough. Everything’s in German, but a portable audio guide translates it all. They cover in great detail the history of international law, the charges brought, the defendants and their imprisonment, the attorneys, the judges, the prosecution and defense, the verdicts, and the aftermath. Two hours well spent.
We drove almost three hours north into the state of Thuringia. This is my first trip beyond the old Iron Curtain. Near the town of Weimar is the Buchenwald concentration camp, opened in 1937. By the end of the war, it was the largest camp of all. It’s sad that this atrocity is so close to Weimar, the heart of German classicism (Goethe and Schiller). It is a very large site and I was surprised to see a number of rather modern buildings, presumably from the Soviet era. When I was stationed in Germany in the 70s, I lived and worked in buildings quite like these. But most of the wartime camp buildings are just shallow foundations filled with rocks.
We had two and a half hours to wander on our own. I entered the original camp gate with its steel letters saying “Jedem das Seine,” which means “To each his own,” an odd sentiment. I found two large memorials of rocks—one for the Sinti and Roma victims, the other for Jewish victims. The main building to visit is a former depot with two floors of exhibits about the camp history, its inmates, living conditions, illicit medical experimentation, executions, etc. I was familiar with the reputations of two of the inmates: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Elie Wiesel. There was a small section about Allied bombing of factories here on August 24, 1944, in which 400 inmates were killed, 2000 injured. The exhibits were quite well done with good English translations.
I didn’t see everything possible. There was a portion called the Little Camp that was a quarantine for critically ill inmates, but also a lot of children. And Soviet Special Camp 2, opened after the war to cruelly imprison POWs and opponents of the new regime. There was an art exhibition that was locked. I passed by the crematorium building but didn’t realize it was open for visiting. We finished up by visiting a memorial tower and a heroic statue of victims.
It was a two and a half–hour drive to Kassel and our hotel, the “Hessenland by Stay Awesome.” Wow, pretty bad (but the only really substandard hotel on the trip). We had the unique experience of having to line up to enter all of our personal information (address, email, birthday, passport data) onto data kiosks before we could check in. The hotel is actually in downtown Kassel and there are some restaurants in walking distance, but I did not join the group because it is simply too late (well after 8) for me to want to eat. I had had a piece of apple cake back at the concentration camp.