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
- Panzer Museum, Bergen-Belsen (this page)
- Bremen, Hamburg, Peenemünde, Sachsenhausen, Berlin, Torgau, Seelow
Thursday, October 17 — Panzer Museum, Munster, and Bergen-Belsen, Hannover
We drove three hours north to Munster to visit the Deutsches Panzer Museum, the site on our itinerary I was most eager to see. (At one time I considered flying to Germany just for the museum, or perhaps by extending another trip, but found out about this tour instead.) I was not disappointed in our two-hour visit. There was not a lot new to me, but I just love seeing and communing with these noble iron beasts. Most of the vehicle information placards are bilingual, but the large displays with general information about the wars and other topics are only in German. The supermajority of vehicles are German from the world wars, the Cold War, and recent times, but there are some Soviet and British tanks and a number of US vehicles in Bundeswehr colors. I took photos of about a third of the displays, ignoring most cars, trucks, artillery pieces, and motorcycles. Two highlights for me were a beautiful Tiger replica made of plastic (used for some camouflage training) and a prototype of the MBT-70.
We drove a half hour south to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, our third of the trip. Left on our own to tour, I went to the exhibition building, a massive concrete structure in the brutalist style. The camp started out as a Stalag for Soviet POWs. Graphical descriptions and photos in the exhibits reminded me of the Civil War Andersonville prison camp, except in much more severe weather—trying to survive in open fields, digging holes for shelter. Twenty thousand Soviet POWs died from the weather, disease, and executions. The exhibits emphasized how many violations of the Geneva Conventions occurred. In the summer of 1942 the SS took over half the area for a regular concentration camp, primarily for Jewish hostages intended for eventual exchange for other civilian prisoners. In the fall of 1943, after Italy surrendered to the Allies, as many as 100,000 Italian soldiers were imprisoned, and the next summer 4500 Poles arrived after the failed Warsaw uprising. Altogether, 52,000 perished here, including Anne Frank, who had been transferred from Auschwitz in late ‘44. After the war there were displaced persons camps here until 1950, particularly Jews. There was a discussion of the judicial aftermath and sorry to say that very few of the guards are officers were actually punished.
I walked around a lot outside the exhibition building and found that it was quite different in appearance from the other two camps. It was mostly wooded and virtually no buildings were left. There is a tall obelisk memorial and a variety of small plaques and monuments scattered around. A sign indicates that the gravestones are illustrative and do not represent actual graves, so I paid little attention and overlooked the gravestone of Anne Frank (it happens to be in the gravestone photo below, far left) although I believe her remains have never been identified in the mass graves of Bergen-Belsen. Unusual bulges of earth, covered in grass, are memorialized as those mass graves.
It was about an hour drive to the city of Hannover, where we checked in to the Kaiserhof hotel, right downtown. It is a step up from the previous couple of hotels, although the single room I was assigned is really quite compact and the bed is pretty tiny for someone of my stature. A group of us walked around downtown, which is very modern and pleasant, and went to a decent pizza restaurant called Francesca & Fratelli Altstadt.