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
• Bremen, Hamburg, Peenemünde, Sachsenhausen, Berlin, Torgau, Seelow (this page)

Friday, October 17 — Bremen and Hamburg

We started with a two-hour drive to Bremen. Our stop was the Valentin submarine pens building on the Weser River. It is a stupendous concrete block (426 x 97 meters with 4.5 m thick walls) that was built by slave labor from 1943 to March 1945. It was to be the largest such facility in Germany, second only to Brest, France. Before it could be completed and start assembling and launching U-boats, on March 27, 1945, British Lancaster bombers hit it with Grand Slam and Tall Boy earthquake bombs (what we now call bunker busters) and despite only two penetrating hits, halted construction at 90% completed.

The front gate has a modest monument, “Extermination through labor,” commemorating all the lives of prisoners who died in construction. Inside is a self-guided tour of the mostly empty, dark, cavernous rooms, including numerous signs and a brief movie. Awe inspiring.

We drove about two hours to Hamburg, passing some impressive port infrastructure on the Elbe River. We stopped briefly at the Flakturm VI Wilhelmsburg, an enormous structure that was refurbished as a power station. It is what was called a G-Tower (Gefechtsturm or "Combat Tower", 57 x 57 x 41.6 meters, equipped with eight 128 mm guns and sixteen 20 mm guns). The adjoining L-Tower (Leitturm or "Lead Tower," also known as the Fire-control tower, 50 x 23 x 44 meters, equipped with forty 20 mm guns) was demolished. As many as 20,000 people could take shelter inside. We couldn’t go in but got some exterior photos. Then a quick lunch at a sandwich shop.

We attempted to find the dock (#9) where the Bismarck battleship was built but it was in a private shipyard and we couldn’t get near it. After a long drive in heavy traffic, we found the Fink II U-boat pens that were somehow lost until 2006 when they were found during construction of an airfield. Each of the pens could fit two subs. They were covered by a thick bunker during the war, but it was destroyed in Allied bombing in March–April 1945. Note that in the wartime photograph below, there is water on both sides of the pans, but now half of that has been filled in for the airport.

Back downtown we found a large conical air raid shelter that is now a Portuguese restaurant, Galego. Then nearby was Flakturm IV, Heiligengeistfeld G-Tower, built in 1942, 75 x 75 meters by 35 m high, 3.5 m walls, designed to accommodate 18,000 people. During the air raids on Hamburg in the summer of 1943, as many as 25,000 people sought shelter in the bunker. The L-Tower was demolished. The remaining tower looks quite different today because a five story Hard Rock hotel and nightclub was added on top, with a rooftop garden sprinkled with trees. I wanted to climb to the top on the new exterior staircases, but we were seriously behind schedule and were allotted only five minutes to take a photo.

Our final stop was at a small monument in the middle of a busy commercial street, commemorating some of the dead from Allied bombing. Our hotel is downtown, the Lindner JdV by Hyatt, and it is the first really nice hotel of the trip. I dined around the corner at a cozy French restaurant called Petit Bonheur, which was excellent. I was a bit disoriented as I careened back-and-forth with the staff between German and French.

Saturday, October 19 — Peenemünde

It’s about a four-hour drive to our first and only scheduled stop, the museum of the Nazi rocket program at Peenemünde. Outside displays include a replica A4 (V2) prototype 4 constructed from the original parts, and a V1 replica mounted on its catapult for launching. The V1 was designated the Fieseler-Werke (from Kassel) Fi 103 and it used a Walter split tube catapult, this one recovered from the Pas de Calais. There were three floors of exhibits in the old power plant building. I did not realize how large this project was, with more than 12,000 people working in hundreds of buildings and laboratories. They had a dedicated internal railroad line 80 km long. It was the largest military industrial complex in Germany. After the war, the Soviets demolished most of the buildings. I was surprised to learn that one of the most significant technical problems they had to solve was producing sufficient liquid oxygen—each V2 launch used 5 tons.

The British bombing in August 1943 caused sufficient damage to close down their production site, moving it to their Mittelwerk underground factories in Nordhausen (the facility we chose to omit from our itinerary earlier in the week). The third floor of the power planet exhibition concerned the archaeology and historiography of the site, which wasn’t all that interesting, but the second floor got into the technical details of the various rockets that they researched and produced. The first launch of the V2 was October 3, 1942, which was earlier than I had anticipated. They also had details about a two-stage A9/A10 Amerika rocket, which was designed to hit New York with 4 tons of warhead. There was also an A4b, an experimental V2 that had wings for gliding longer distances to the target. There was a model display that showed scale models of the A3, A5, A4, and C2 Wasserfall. The first floor had a lot of editorializing about the Cold War and the danger of atomic weapons. In a separate building, there was an elevator that went up three stories for a panoramic view of the island.

We attempted to find some of the actual launching sites in the woods, but they were not accessible. So we went to our hotel relatively early in the afternoon, the City Hotel in the small town of Wolgast. There was an amusing situation here because the desk clerk could not speak English and no one in our tour group other than me knew any German, so I was able to help out a little bit ("ein bisschen"). The hotel is quite basic, probably related to its location in the former East Germany, but I found it comfortable enough. Our entire group went out exploring for a restaurant, which was more difficult than any of us expected on a Saturday night, and we finally ended up with a very decent Italian restaurant on the waterfront, Portofino 'Zur Schlossinsel'.

Sunday, October 20 — Below Forest, Sachsenhausen

It was two and a half hours driving to Below Forest. We encountered an open field in which museum quality displays were erected commemorating the Death Marches of 1945 as the front lines were getting close to the concentration camps were and prisoners were forcibly relocated to the northwest, marching as many 40 km a day without food or water or shelter. About a third of the 700,000 prisoners perished on the march. Here in the small woods, 16,000 were gathered in a provisional camp within a barbed wire perimeter April 23-29.

Then another two hours to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg, our fourth camp of the week. It was opened in 1936 primarily for political prisoners, but being close to Berlin, it served as an SS training course and many of the graduates went to lead other concentration camps. It also was the place in which mass execution systems were researched and perfected. The place is really big. Most of the buildings are only foundations now, but there are excellent maps and signage. A number of the remaining buildings contain specialized exhibits. Prominent is a 40-meter monument erected by the Soviets. Nearby is a long camp wall with numerous displays about prominent camp personnel and the evolution of execution methods. Behind it are well-preserved execution trenches (gruesome to contemplate) and a building called Station Z, a crematorium and place of extermination, with a moving memorial to the victims.

Soviet Special Camp Number 7 is an exhibit in a stern-looking low slung steel building. The Soviets liberated Sachsenhausen and then turned it into their own prison camp. The Prisoners’ Kitchen building presents the history of the camp. Barracks building 38 presents the Jewish prisoner experience and Barracks 39 the everyday life of prisoners in general. The Infirmary Barracks covers the medical treatment and criminal medical sterilizations and experiments. There’s a building called the New Museum, but it is empty except for a large stained glass window depicting 1961 East German regime themes. A series of modern buildings were the SS barracks, but is now the Brandenburg University’s Center for Applied Police Sciences, which seems to be a questionable location. A ways outside the main camp area is the T Building with the exhibit “Center of Terror, the Concentration Camps Inspectorate 1934-1945.”

It was about 45 minutes to our hotel in [East] Berlin, the H4 at Alexanderplatz, one of the busiest tourist areas of Berlin. It is a modern, decent hotel and we have the luxury of staying here four nights. The single room is small but very comfortable. We had dinner in the hotel restaurant, which was so-so.

Monday, October 21 — Berlin

It was a little damp this morning, but no raincoats were needed during the day. We embarked on a visit to many Berlin highlights. First was Bebelplatz, the site of a famous book burning on May 10, 1933. The large square has a plaque in the pavement and a window showing empty bookshelves beneath the street. Then Brandenburg Gate, built in the late 1780s. In the Tiergarten district, we visited the outside of the Bundestag, the former Reichstag that was burned in 1933. Nearby, the Soviet Memorial is fronted by two T34-76 tanks and a large structure emblazoned with untranslated Cyrillic. The site encompasses 2000 graves.

One of our guests wanted to visit a particular famous cemetery, so we drove to the Invalidenfriedhof, the traditional resting place for senior commanders in the Prussian army, and visited graves of Fritz Todt, Reinhard Heydrich (a slim unmarked stone), Alfred von Schlieffen, Gerhard Scharnhorst, and Helmuth von Moltke. There is a monument to Baron von Richthofen, but I believe he is no longer actually buried here.

Next was Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstraße. Lots of tourists, snacks, and souvenirs here, as well as some minor museums we didn’t visit. For some reason a photo of US Sergeant Jeffrey Harper is hanging over the street. He was an army band tuba player who was not stationed at the checkpoint. Then the Führerbunker, which is now simply a parking lot. Maybe something is buried underneath, but there was no way to access it. I have to say this area looked substantially different from what I expected after seeing the (outstanding) movie Downfall. The nearby Jewish memorial with its underground exhibit was closed on Monday, so we’ll try to get back to it. The very unusual above-ground collection of large stone blocks is supposedly inspired by a road in the Kidron Valley of Israel.

We made a very long stop at the “Topographie des Terrors,” which is modern museum building on the site of the various security services—Gestapo, SS, SD, and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA). Inside is a very comprehensive history of these services and their crimes during the war and a separate special exhibition on the life and infamous career of Reinhard Heydrich. Outdoor there is a very long series of displays about Berlin 1933-45, just in front of 200 meters of the old Berlin Wall on Niederkirchnerstraße separating the districts of Mitte (East) and Kreuzberg (West). (In the second photo below, the large building in the background is the former Luftwaffe headquarters.)

We got a bit tired out and decided against a second museum this afternoon. Instead we drove to the close-by Templehof airport, now closed but a center of the Berlin airlift in 1948-49. There is a large concrete memorial in the park to the men who died in the operation. A few of us had dinner at L’Osteria, a bustling local Italian restaurant.

Tuesday, October 22 — Torgau, Seelow Heights

Another big busing day. Two and a half hours south to Torgau to see the bridge over the Elbe where US and Soviet forces first linked up. The first encounter, on April 25, 1945, actually took place at Strehla, 18 miles upstream from Torgau; it involved a U.S. reconnaissance team of the 69th Infantry Division, led by Lieut. Albert Kotzebue. Three hours later another patrol, under Lieut. William D. Robertson, came upon a group of Soviet infantrymen near Torgau. Inching out onto the girders of the wrecked bridge over the Elbe, Robertson embraced Lieut. Alexander Silvashko of the 173rd Rifle Regiment. Staged photos of senior commanders meeting with handshakes were taken on April 26. There isn’t much to see here. The roadway bridge is entirely different in design from the blown-out 1945 version. There are two Soviet monuments. The riverfront view is dominated by the imposing Hartenfels Castle, built on 1544. Torgau is also noted for its role as a military “justice” center, where at least 1200 executions were carried out, but we did not seek out any evidence of this.

Next, another two and a half hours to Seelow Höhen (Heights), site of the critical initial assaults in the Battle of Berlin. There is a museum and memorial. Outside in front are a T34-85, a rocket launcher truck, and a couple of artillery pieces. The museum is quite basic with more information about creating the memorial than about the battle, and a few artifacts. There’s a battle movie that is visually interesting but entirely in German without subtitles. Climbing a hill we visited a Soviet victory monument and got a view of the battlefield terrain, the Oderbruch, below. Then 90 minutes back to the hotel.

Dinner for almost the entire group was at the Hofbräuhaus just down the street. This was quite an evening. The giant room has seating for 1000 and everything was loud and boisterous with a small band playing traditional beer hall music and the crowd singing the two beer hall songs that I actually know. The beer and food were excellent, so the experience was superior to the Löwenbräukeller in Munich.

Wednesday, October 23 — Berlin

Our final day in Berlin was museum focused, so we started at a leisurely 9 AM to accommodate opening hours. We started at the German Resistance Museum, which I had hoped to be a memorial to Georg Ohm (nyuk, nyuk), but no. It’s housed in an imposing building complex called Bendlerblock, which was the General Army Office of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH). There is a temporary exposition called Fraue im Widerstand that highlights dozens of prominent women who were involved in the resistance. There is also an entire section in the permanent exhibition about operation Valkyrie (Walküre), the plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. In the courtyard is the spot where Claus von Stauffenberg and some of the conspirators were shot, marked by a wreath and plaque. The museum is very stylish, but, like many of the museums we’ve visited, it’s difficult to absorb hundreds of individual photographs and histories.

Next, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which we tried to visit Monday. We were forced to wait almost 30 minutes to get through the very slow moving security screening. The interior started with an exhibition about the history of the Holocaust, which was interesting, but was at about the level of detail as a Wikipedia article. Another section focused on about a dozen families, showing pictures and histories of their persecution. One dark room flashed up the name of an individual on multiple screens and gave a paragraph of audio information about their fate, sometimes in English but usually in German. There were a series of audio listening devices to hear personalized stories of individuals who survived, and then there were a series of maps showing all of the different camps around Europe.

On the way to our next stop, we passed by the magnificent Victory Column, commemorate German victories against Denmark, Austria, and France in the 1860-70s. After a 30 minute drive southwest, we reached the Wannsee Conference House in the swanky suburb fronting on Wannsee Lake. This was the January 20, 1942, conference called by Reinhard Heydrich to determine the “final solution“ to the Jewish problem. Although as many as 900,000 had already been killed by this time, and the decision to kill all the rest of the Jews had already been made at the highest level, the 90 minute conference worked out some of the logistical details of how the various state ministries and the SS could deport millions more to occupied Poland and murder them. The exhibits in the mansion are rather limited, covering the general situation, the conference attendees and agenda, the Protocol they agreed on, the Holocaust itself in general, and the history of how this site has been handled since. Reproductions of many of the document pages are available and good English translations are included. Although thirty copies of the Protocol and meeting minutes were produced, only one copy survived, discovered by a US soldier in 1947 before it could be destroyed.

Our original itinerary called for a visit to the Museum Berlin Karlshorst, site of the surrender on May 8, 1945 (the second surrender ceremony that Stalin demanded to be held in Berlin), but the travel time all the way to the other side of metropolitan area could not be squeezed in. On the way back to the hotel, we got a nice view of the massive Berliner Dom (Cathedral). Berlin seems to be a very attractive, livable city (if you ignore the winter weather). As I waited for dinner, I decided I could not leave Berlin without getting a Berliner, or a Krapfe, what we call a jelly doughnut. I went to two cafés, two donut shops, and eventually found one at the train station nearby. I am sorry to say it was not very good. Perhaps it was too late in the day and it got a little stale. Our farewell dinner was at the hotel, the second meal of the week that the tour company paid for (other than breakfast). A good time was had by all.

Thursday, October 24 — Flying home

Our trusty bus driver, Jup, took seven of us to the airport (the others either had very early flights and took a cab or were going to take the train). BER (Brandenburg Willy Brandt) is a relatively new airport and now the only one serving Berlin. I had a brief flight to Frankfurt am Main and then a relatively short layover for my direct flight to San Francisco. The first leg was on Lufthansa with a United Airlines flight number, the second on United.

I had a good time on my Valor tour. I usually sign up for tours that are more focused on military activities, such as strategy, campaigns, terrain, maps, and battle tactics, but this one was more focused on political movements and concentration camps. So some of my expectations were a little off-base and thus unrealized. But I enjoyed the company of Bob, Jup, and my fellow travelers and look forward to a future tour. Actually, I am signed up for another in March 2025, returning with Valor to Vietnam.