Our trip has included three weeks of travel by train and public transport, then two weeks with a car. Our last three days, while in Munich, featured plenty of walking.
On Saturday, we enjoyed taking a beer tour that featured a visit to the beer museum and to three locations that provided opportunities to sample their beers, and meet locals celebrating a German holiday. There is definitely something about German beers that is so tasty! Both of us enjoyed making the most of these beers which came as a real surprise to Sue who is a lifelong non-beer drinker. The tour group was delightful and our conversations were surprisingly deep and enriching.
Sunday provided two opportunities to explore Munich.
We took a three-hour Segway tour and it was pouring rain the entire time. It really was a hoot and at one point we broke out in laughter while we were rolling through the blustery wind and showers. Thankfully, we were prepared with our bicycling rain gear and the second poncho that we were given kept us pretty dry although we were still cold. We covered ten miles of sights and received an excellent overview of the city from our knowledgeable guide. Yet again we were the only two in our group tour, because four others decided rolling in the rain wasn’t worth it. We learned that most of Munich, bombed by the allies, was rebuilt as it used to look.
We then walked to the NS-Dokumentationszentrum, a museum which focuses on the history of the growth of the Nazi Party and the role of Munich as the capital of the movement. It is built on the site of the ‘Brown House’ which was the political headquarters for the Nazi party and was destroyed by bombing in WWII. The building is dedicated to providing information about Nazi history from 1918 to 1945, what they did and how they did it, so that a deeper understanding will help to insure that nothing like that can be allowed to happen again. It also encourages young people especially to speak up against intolerance.
On Monday, we joined a tour to visit the nearby Dachau Concentration Camp where we came face-to-face with the horror and darkness of the German concentration camp system.
Our tour leader Martina, in a powerful and personal way, weaved her families’ personal stories into tour, telling of her German grandparents who worked with the Nazis and what happened to her husband’s Jewish ancestors.
Sobering is not even close to describing the heaviness and feeling of walking on ground where 206,000 prisoners were forced into labor, medical experiments, and tortured. We learned that the SS ideology was to systematically and consistently dehumanize the prisoners. Dachau was the first, and the ‘model’ for hundreds of other concentration camps across Germany and Poland.
We entered through the iron gate that stated, ‘Arbeit Mach Frei’ (work makes you free) and walked through the registration building where prisoners had to hand over everything from their former life and endure a horrific processing system. Their identity was then changed from their name to a number. Prisoners then entered a tortured life of slave labor in the armament industry to help Germany’s war machine. In this labrynth of lies, people who could no longer work, or resisted, were exterminated. Mostly, at Dachau those imprisoned died of malnutrition and sickness.
We were heartened to learn that it is required for German students to visit a concentration camp with their school class. We saw many such groups and amidst the bravado of youth, there seemed to be a growing awareness of what really happened.
After five weeks on the road, we are so grateful for these traveling opportunities and really looking forward to being back home. Thanks so much for joining us vicariously! We’ll publish one additional post summarizing our trip.
