August 13, 2018
From August 2018 A visit to the German Tank Museum in Munster, Lower Saxony – about an hour outside of Hamburg. The quote on the wall says “He who wants peace, talk of war”. Replica of a German A7V tank from World War I. The only genuine surviving article is in Australia. Inside the German […]
September 17, 2019
In July 1945, the leaders of the three Allied Powers that had just defeated Hitler – Churchill, Truman, and Stalin – met at Potsdam, southwest of Berlin, to plot the continuing war against Japan and the immediate future of post-war Germany. They met at Schloss Cecilienhof, a rambling Tudor mansion built by the Crown Prince […]
September 29, 2019
A trip to Weimar, Buchenwald, and two very different Germanies. In 1775, the duke of the tiny German state of Saxe-Weimar invited the German-speaking world’s hottest new celebrity, 25-year old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to take up residence in his quiet little capital. Goethe was famous because of his hit novel “The Sorrows if Young […]
September 20, 2019
From September 20, 2019: Status: Currently escaping from Colditz Castle. Will let you know how it goes. If you’ve ever played and enjoyed “Castle Wolfenstein”, this post is for you. During WW2, Colditz Castle, about an hour southeast of Leipzig, served a top-security prison for Allied POWs, most of them officers. The Allied prisoners sent […]
September 26, 2019
From September 26, 2019: Over the weekend, I had the chance to visit Tempelhof, Berlin’s original airport and a very important site in the city’s history. Even before there was a terminal, Tempelhof Field, located south of Berlin’s city center, was witness to some of the earliest steps in aviation – including a demonstration, in […]