Munich and surrounding

My train ride from Salzburg to Munich was the shortest I have been on so far, just 1.5 hours, but it felt like the longest by far. Jamie!

Got off the train and went to the tourist info place as arranged, however Jamie had decided to alter the plans already and instead went and waited at the train coming in from Salzburg. Unfortunately, he got the wrong train and missed me completely. Great start haha. Eventually we did meet up and were reunited for the first time in 4 months, yay!

Now accompanied by a travel buddy, we went off to explore Munich and work out just why this city is raved about by all the other backpackers I have met so far. On our free tour the answer soon became apparent quite strongly, Beer. This city has a LOT to do with beer. Not being a beer fan myself, I was starting to wonder if I would enjoy Munich as much as I was supposed to. The fact that this city is where Hitler really started to develop a name for the Nazi party, where he had his failed revolution and was thrust in the limelight, made the cities history more appealing to me than its favorite beverage.

I did learn a thing or two about beer however which was quite interesting. For one beer is more or less so the invention of the Monks, who used to make it for their private consumption. Now they have commercialized the beverage just a little bit and it is now at the disposal of every person from the age of 16 (legal age of beer drinking in Germany) and up. Not to mention worldwide. Anyway, apparently these beers with the history of being made in the monasteries are still considered to be the finest by the locals. One beer has not needed to do any marketing for the last 200 years! In fact the pope, who is from Munich, loves his beer so much that he gets a barrel of his favorite sent to the Vatican every month, making this beer known to the locals as “Gods Beer”.  The Hofbrauhaus is arguably the world’s best known pub, and although we didn’t make it in there (there was a soccer match on this particular day so the place was jam packed) we heard enough to make me not want to go in there. This pub has been around for a LONG time, so long that when it was first built it was built without any toilets and the hundreds of men would urinate on the street. There are still ditches running along the path from the doorway, where the pee used to run along. When the men started to get sick of having to leave the hall, which meant losing their seats and even worse, their BEER (not to how chilly tinkling in the winter would be), they started to get pretty inventive. They decided that the waste system worked fine, it just needed to begin a little earlier, so they created a “gutter system” running under the tables and then outside, so that the men didn’t even have to stand up, let alone leave the room! And just because that isn’t revolting enough, they also needed to come up with a system to make sure that they didn’t spray everyone else around the table on the legs while they did their business, so they invented a walking stick system where they would tap the leg of each person to warn them they were gonna go. The walking stick also served as a useful tool to help one aim, especially after a few. YUCK. 

Anyway, enough about that. Munich is a very pretty city and has the famous Glockenspiel which is considered to be one of the most overrated tourist attractions in Europe. Jamie and I never actually saw it, we saw the beginning one day, but the music plays and nothing moves for about 5 minutes, so we gave up and had to leave (we were late for our tour).

We were able to go on a few excursions outside of Munich.

The last day we were in Munich we took the train out to Fussen, which is where the giant castle built by King Ludwig (I remember the name cause it was Jamie’s favorite word to use for everything when he learnt it), which is also the castle that inspired Walt Disney when he saw It and so the castle for Sleeping Beauty was modeled on it. The hike up was a lot of fun dodging the ‘authentic’ 1800s horses lugging up their carts of camera yielding Chinese tourists while enjoying the beautiful snowy wilderness. I had wanted to get an action shot in front of the castle when we got to the top, unsure of how Jamie would take it I told him briefly before we started the hike and then quickly asked a Spanish lady to take our picture while we did our appropriate poses. Thank you Jamie.

The first excursion was to Dachau Concentration camp, the only concentration camp to last the entire time of the Nazi rule. It was originally set up to house the politicians who part of the communist and social democrat parties, and who were suspected of plotting to overthrow Hitler, or who would not vote him in after the Reichstag fires.  As the Nazi reign went on Jews, immigrants, gays and anyone else from minority groups where thrust into Dachau (one of the MANY camps around northern/eastern Europe). I will not even attempt to try and describe what life would have been like for the many that were overcrowded into this camp, because I would never be able to do the suffering and the terror that they went through justice. I have no idea. I will just say however, that the day we went was cold. Very cold. Jamie and I were both shivering and our limbs were feeling the chill particularly bad. It was snowing and my shoes were getting a little wet from all the slush that was on the ground. We were both wearing thermals, 2 socks, long sleeves, fleece vests and big jackets. The clothes that the prisoners were issued with back in the 30s/40s were a single set of flimsy pajama pants and a button down top, with a cap and a pair of fabric slip ons. They had to stand out in the weather (Jan through Dec), in the dead of winter, for at least a couple of hours every morning and evening for roll call. Roll calls, if things weren’t perfectly in order, could sometimes last up to 13 hours. Doing that in the freezing cold, the strong wind, the wet slushy snow on the ground wearing next to nothing…can’t even begin to imagine the torture. The rest I will just briefly explain using the pictures I took.

The entry gate of Dachau, the gate has the inscription (Hard work makes you free) in German, a form of psychological torture for the prisoners who would never get out, no matter how hard they worked. Today there is a open gate policy, to signify that this camp should never be closed off again. There is also a side path entry so that the returning victims from the camp do not have to enter the same gate they were forced through years ago.

The large space is what you see as soon as you get through the gate. At first it seems large, but when you consider how many people were confined to this area, it would soon become small. The long flat building to the left is a reconstruction of what the 30 originaly on the property looked like. this free space in the centre of the camp was used for roll calls every morning and evening.

One of the most common forms of torture that the nazis used on the prisoners. This particular one involved a person kneeling on the right raised platform while he lent over top with his arms outstretch. the guard would then whip the prinsoner with a whip 20 times. The prisoner would need to count outloud in perfect german after each whip. If the prisoner did not say the number loud enough the count would start again. There were also a lot of foreign prisoners which meant that if they could not count to 20, or had bad pronounciation of the number they would be whipped until they either got it right or passed out. THis torture was one of the three most common, so understandably one of the first things that the older prisoners would teach the new prisoners when they first got into the camp, was how to count to 20.

THis monument was erected to commemorate the many prisoners of concentrations all over europe who took their own lives by jumping onto the electric barbed wire fences. THis form of suicide became a sort of "movement" to send the message to the Nazis that although they had taken all their dignity, all their possessions and families they could not dictate how they would end their lives.

Communial toilets in the bunkers, there would have been very long waits as there were far more prisoners than toilets and absolutly no privacy whatsoever. The nazis thought of these people as animals, and animals have no need for privacy.

These bunks are replicas of what the bunks looked like towards the 40s, thare are no dividers and no pillows or matteresses. The bunkers are built to hold a mazimum, of 250 people. There is a large copy of a nazi documentjsut outside this room that shows that the number of people in some bunkers were up to 1000, 1500 and one even had 2000 in it. The overcrowding is just unimaginable, the people would have to sleep intop of each other, in piles and piles, and in the morning they would wake up to carry the many dead out to roll call.

Imagine grass instead of the snow for a clearer picture first. The captives weren't aloud to touch the grass at all or else they would get shot at by the guards in the watch towers. But often a guard would take a prisoners hat and throw it on the grass, ordering him to go and fetch it. If the captive ran to get his hat, the watchman would shoot at him. But if the prisoner refused to get it, then the officer on the ground would shoot him for disobeying. If somehow the prisoner was successful in run and getting the hat without being shot, the officer would throw it back again and in the end the situation was a lose lose for the prisoner.

The crematorium used to cremete the dead bodies. Nearing the end of WWII and the closure of this concentration camp, there was a lack of coal and such enormous quantities of bodies that they had to stop using the crematorium and instead throw the bodies into mass graves. When the americans came in to take over the camp, they found hundreds of bodies piled up outside of this crematorium.

 

This statue is called "the unknown inmate" and the words below translate "To honor the dead, to admonish the living." It was erected to commemorate all those unknown people who were killed and died in this concentration camp. It is a particularly powerful piece because it shows the prisoner in his anti-nazi state. For on the prisoner is wearing an overcoat that is not official unifrom, and it is also too large which means he does not look neat enough. IF he had been in the camp he would have been punished for this. The prisoner is also standing in a relaxed position, he is not at attention and this would also have been punished by the Nazis. The part that strikes me the most I think is the fact that he has his hands in his pockets. The Nazis put the pockets his these unifroms for the sole purpose of psychological torture, the prisoners were not allowed to put their hands in them under any circumstance or they would be tortured by the guards

It was an incredibly sobering experience but one that is invaluable I think, I am very thankful for the oppertunity to see it as is Jamie. 

On to Switzerland next my friends,

Love to you all! xoxo