Westerplatte - Let's start at the beginning. Many Americans know that our (declared) participation in the war didn't start until after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and then Germany declared war on us shortly after. But WWII started in September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The Battle of Westerplatte was the first battle of the war, when the German navy fired upon a military depot on the Baltic Sea border of Poland. The depot was manned by only 200 Poles, but they fought off over 3,000 Germans for a week before surrendering. Learning even a little more about just the modern history of Poland, its resistance and refusal to give up, you cannot help but admire the pride and strength of its people. We saw Westerplatte and the memorial to those who defended the depot on April 29, 2010.
The Monument to the Defenders of Westerplatte sticking up over the trees
Wannsee - The Holocaust. The "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was discussed at the Wannsee Conference, which was held in a suburb of Berlin in January 1942. While extermination was already being conducted at the time of the conference, the 90-minute meeting clarified that carrying out the "handling" of the Jews was under the control of the SS alone. It also clarified what was do be done with those of differing degrees of mixed race and made sure that everyone present was an accessory to the murders. The villa where it was held is still there, and you can tour inside, which we did on April 6, 2009.
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The conference room
Concentration Camps - Seeing the place where the fate of the Jews was decided was nothing in comparison to seeing where that decision was actually carried out. We visited four concentration camps while living in Europe. Dachau was the first camp built and was a model for other camps. It is also the first we visited on December 15, 2006. We also visited Buchenwald (July 27, 2008) and Sachsenhausen (November 28, 2008). Buchenwald was opened shortly after Dachau and was the largest camp on German soil. Sachsenhausen mostly held political prisoners and was the site of the largest counterfeit operation ever. Those three camps were in Germany, while the last camp we visited was in Poland. The most notorious camp of all, Auschwitz and Birkenau, which we saw on September 25, 2010, became a major extermination site. Over 1 million prisoners died there, of which about 90% were Jewish.
Dachau concentration camp
Barracks used to line this main street inside the camp
Crematorium
Buchenwald concentration camp
Literally "to each his own", but figuratively "everyone gets what he deserves”
Marking the locations of the barracks
Sachsenhausen concentration camp
"Work will make you free"
The prisoners would have to run on this track all day to test footwear for the military
Auschwitz concentration camp
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Anne Frank House - Jewish people did everything they could to escape the horrible treatment, and death, handed out at the hands of the Nazis. One well-known account of hiding was written by a teenage girl named Anne Frank. She hid in some rooms above an office in Amsterdam with her family and others for two years before being captured and sent to Auschwitz. She later died at the Bergen-Belsen camp when she was 15 years old. The annex where she hid is now a very popular place to visit, which we did on May 2, 2008.
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Sophie Scholl - In February 1943, a group called the White Rose was arrested for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets around the University of Munich. Sophie Scholl, her brother and a friend were all convicted of treason and put to death four days later. A copy of this leaflet was smuggled out of Germany and then dropped all over the country by the Allied forces. She left a brave legacy with her last words: "How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?" She was only 21 years old. We stopped by the University of Munich on April 11, 2007 and saw the memorial of the leaflets in the square as well as where they were distributed by the Scholls.
The main building on the campus where leaflets were distributed
Part of the memorial to the White Rose on the courtyard outside the above building
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Warsaw Ghetto and Uprising - The Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw was the largest of its kind in Nazi-occupied Europe. There was a wall built around the ghetto in 1940 and it ended up holding about 30% of Warsaw's population (but was only 2% of the land area). In 1943, after the Jews realized that the "deportations" of its people were really trips to concentration/extermination camps, the inhabitants started a resistance against the Germans. The Ghetto Uprising lasted about four months, and after the Germans regained control, Hitler ordered the ghetto be razed to the ground and everyone killed or sent to concentration camps. There are a few remnants of the ghetto left, and there are also boundary markers on the ground where the wall used to be. We visited some of these on August 15, 2010.
A plaque describing the ghetto and what happened.
One of the entrances to the ghetto.
Where the wall once stood.
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Bombed-Out Church - The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was destroyed in an air raid in November 1943. The damaged spire was left as a memorial and it is now a famous landmark in Berlin. We always called it "the bombed-out church" and saw it frequently between 2006 and 2009.
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Wolf's Lair - Hitler had a number of headquarters throughout Germany and Poland during WWII (and was planning on even more, including Książ Castle as I mentioned in my previous post). Wolf's Lair (or Wolfsschanze in German) is located in northern Poland and was built for the start of the invasion of the USSR. It is now well known as the location of an assassination attempt made on Hitler in July 1944. We visited the massive complex on September 4, 2010.
A map of the complex.
What's left of the building where Stauffenberg set the bomb to kill Hitler.
Hitler's bunker.
Bendlerblock - The building complex known as Bendlerblock in Berlin has been used for various government and military purposes since 1914. The aforementioned assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944 was headquartered here, and the day of the attempt culminated in the deaths of several conspirators, including Claus von Stauffenberg, in its courtyard. There is now a Memorial to the German Resistance there, which we saw on May 23, 2009.
The courtyard.
Plaque honoring those who were killed here for their part in the assassination attempt.
A close up of the plaque.
Oskar Schindler - Oskar Schindler was a businessman who ended up bribing Nazi officials to let him keep over 1,000 Jews as workers in his factory with the intention to keep them from being sent to camps. His factory in Kraków is now a museum, which we visited on September 25, 2010.
Schindler's factory.
Schindler's office.
Kraków Ghetto - The Kraków Ghetto was established in 1941 and housed 15,000 Jews in the space where 3,000 people could comfortably live. Over the next couple of years, the ghetto was liquidated and the Jews were systematically sent to camps. There was a train that still went through the ghetto while it was separated by a wall, without letting non-Jewish people on or off while inside the ghetto, and you can imagine what the people in the train were thinking as they saw the horrors the Jews were living in. Those train tracks were also used to take Jews to the concentration camps. The main square in the ghetto is now home to a memorial in which each steel chair represents 1,000 victims of the liquidation. We saw the memorial and main square on September 25, 2010.
The memorial in the main square.
Normandy - Normandy is the location of the D-Day landings, the operation conducted by the Allies to invade German-occupied Europe in June 1944. The five sections of beach (Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword) were charged by the Americans, British, and Canadians by air and by sea in the largest seaborne invasion ever. The invasion lasted several days and over 10,000 Allied forces were killed in the victorious effort. There are several remnants of the battle all along the coast, including bunkers, artificial harbors, and bomb craters. We drove along the coast of Normandy, viewing various battle sites and the American cemetery on December 30, 2011.
Arromanches, where the British built a temporary harbor. Some of it remains.
A display on Omaha Beach showing the landing spots along the coast of Normandy.
The Normandy American Cemetery, located on the bluff overlooking Omaha Beach.
Peenemünde - The Germans developed their V-1 flying bomb in Peenemünde, on the north shore of Germany. The V-1 was used to bomb London in June 1944 as a response to D-Day. Another interesting tidbit about the bomb was how the Polish Home Army provided a lot of information to the Allies about it as well as other things throughout the war. Brent toured the Peenemünde Historical Technical Museum on May 2, 2009.
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Warsaw Uprising - On August 1, 1944, the Polish resistance Home Army started an uprising against the Nazi army occupying the city. The resistance wanted to liberate Warsaw before the Soviets did... they knew that once the Soviets came in and forced the Germans from the city, which they were just about to do, control would just be transferred from the Germans to the Soviets instead of to the Poles. The Home Army fought valiantly for two months before the Germans prevailed. After the resistance was over, the Germans razed much of what was left, leaving about 85% of the city destroyed by 1945. 16,000 of the Polish resistance died and up to 200,000 Polish citizens died (most from mass executions) as a result of the uprising. The Soviet army sat outside the city and offered no help. At 5:00 pm on August 1 of every year, Warsaw sounds a siren of remembrance and the entire city pauses for a moment of silence. I remember hearing the siren one year when I was outside our house with my son. We saw the Monument to the Resistance Fighters on September 19, 2009, and we have also been through the very moving Warsaw Uprising Museum (I cannot find the pictures). St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Old Town Warsaw was where some Poles were seeking refuge during the uprising when a German tank busted through the walls. Some rails from the tank are now hanging on the outside wall of the church as a memorial to those lost.
Monument to the Resistance Fighers
The tank chain on the outside wall of St. John the Baptist Cathedral.
Dresden - In February 1945, Allied forces bombed Dresden in what is seen now as an unjustified action because the war was about over anyway. Up to 25,000 people died in these bombings and the city was destroyed. The Frauenkirche is currently a symbol of reconciliation, as it was left in ruins after the war and only rebuilt after the reunification of Germany using some of the original materials, which can be seen in its coloring. We visited Dresden in October and December 2006 as well as December 2008, and we went inside the Frauenkirche on October 9, 2006.
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Reichstag - The 1933 fire of the Reichstag is said to be the event that launched the takeover by Hitler and the Nazis in Germany. During the Battle of Berlin at the end of WWII, the Soviet Army targeted the building and took it over. When the building was reconstructed after reunification, the graffiti that the Soviets painted on the interior walls was left in respect of the historical events. We visited the Reichstag on several occasions between 2006 and 2009, but I cannot find the pictures of the graffiti.
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Berlin's Underworld - While Hitler's bunker has been destroyed and sealed, there is still quite a bit of underworld under the German capital (Berliner Unterwelten). Included are WWII bunkers and tunnels that were to protect Germans from Allied bombings. We did the tour on May 30, 2009.
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The Germans wanted their own word for bathroom, since toilette is French and WC is English. This is a sign to the male toilet.
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This is a sign to the female toilet.
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Potsdam - The Potsdam Conference was held at Schloss Cecilienhof in Potsdam, just outside of Berlin, in July 1945. Results of the conference included splitting Germany and Berlin into four sectors, demilitarizing Germany, changing the borders of Poland, and several other post-war dealings. The room where the conference was held still looks exactly like it did in 1945 and the tour is quite good. We visited Cecilienhof many times, but toured it March 11, 2007.
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Bridge on the River Kwai - So far, we have only visited two places related to the Pacific War. The first was Kanchanaburi, Thailand. For those of you who have seen the movie based on events that occurred here, please know that the real situation was far worse than depicted. The Japanese used 60,000 Allied POWs for the construction of the Burma Railway, forcing them to work under horrible conditions which led to the deaths of over 12,000. There are a couple of museums dedicated to telling the story and we visited them on August 10, 2013.
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The Battle Box - Singapore was a strategic position for the British against the Japanese, and the Battle Box was the name of their headquarters in the country. During WWII, as the Japanese troops pressed them south from Malaysia, the Brits ended up deciding to surrender while seeking refuge there in February 1942. We were unable to tour the bunker while we were in Singapore, but we walked around it on October 26, 2014 and Brent was able to see it again on December 6, 2014.
