Today was World War II history day as today we are visiting the sites of Nuremburg. Jody was particularly excited as she has been reading a lot about Hitler and the Holocaust, and we heve both been watching a lot of WW1 and WW2 documentaries lately. The included tour was a visit to old town Nuremburg, bu we were both looking forward to the optional tour to the Nazi Rally sites and the Nuremburg courtroom where the Nazis were charged with war crimes after WW2.
We began our tour this morning by meeting our local tour guide whos name we missed, but she was a lovely elderly woman who was originally from Minnesota and who had moved here for love when she was 18 and has never been back to the states. She was very knowledgeable about the rise and fall of the Nazis and about the Nuremburg sites as well. She was also plainly when she described the history without the hesitancy the German tour guides seem to have.
We began our tour at Zeppelinfeld, literally Zeppelin Field, a meadow where Count Zeppelin had landed one of his famous Zeppelins back in 1909. Hitler held his first
large rally in this field back in the 1930s and determined that all future rallies would be held in Nuremburg. Zeppelinfeld had a huge podium built at one end of the field, with bleachers for dignitaries and the outer perimeter was lined with a series of concrete piers with terraces between them for spectators to stand. This is the huge field we always see in the movies, with Hitler speaking from the podium and formations of troops parading below. Some of the original buildings are still standing today, though portions of the field are currently used as a soccer field and parts have been paved over for use in auto racing. The column on eithers side of the podium were demolished in the 1960s as they were determined unstable, and a lot of the remaining structure has fallen into disrepair.
One of the big problems with these Nazi sites is that they were hastily constructed and not using the best materials and techniques. Consequently, damage from ice and snow particularly have caused a lot of deterioration. Germans are torn between preservation of the structures, and a concern that restoring them to their former glory would be glorifying the Nazis.
Next we borded the bus and headed over to the Kongresshalle, Congress Hall, which is a horseshoe shaped building intended to emulate the Coliseum in Rome. The outer faade is stone and is very impressive, standing next to a lake from the Middle Ages. The interior is unfinished and is made up of used bricks of various colors with shoddy mortar between them. The intent was to cover up the bricks with marble sheets, and to install a cantilevered roof above the entire structure. This was to be the meeting place for all the party leaders from around Germany hear Hitler speak and deliver orders of what the party should be doing. The building has been used lately as a storage facility, but suffers from the same deterioration due to shoddy construction as the buildings in Zeppelinfeld.
In one of the adjacent buildings that is part of the Kongresshalle , there is a documentation center that holds lots of the original Nazi documentation. It is currently undergoing renovation, so we were able to visit only the temporary museum. In the museum there were some
interesting artifacts showing the rise of the Third Reich and what happened in Nuremburg during the war, and what has happened since.
After the visit to the Kongresshalle, we were back on the bus to the Nuremburg courthouse where, after the war, the German war criminals were tried. The original courtroom 600 used for the trial was still in use until recently as it was the largest room available in the Nuremburg courthouse. Recently a larger courtroom was added to the other end of the courthouse so that room 600 could be turned into a museum.
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