Worms
.gif "Nibelungenbrücke during the war")
Two American GIs take cover on the bridge on the Nibelungenbrücke on March 28, 1945,
as snipers on the other bank of the Rhine take aim and taken from the
same spot in July, 2022. In the foreground lies one of their victims.
During the war, a total of four anti-aircraft guns were set up atop
the tower caps above the stairwells on both bridge towers which had
earlier been removed and replaced by concrete platforms in order to
defend the bridge. On March 20, 1945, the retreating Wehrmacht blew up
the bridge itself. Six days later engineers of the American 85th
Combat Engineers Division built a pontoon bridge
within ten hours a few metres downstream of the destroyed bridge whilst
also building makeshift bridges over the Rhine in the south of Worms
between Bobenheim-Roxheim and Frankenthal and in the north around Hamm
am Rhein. Later a towing ferry was used but this provisional remedy
could only cover the most urgent needs. It was not until 1948 that a
permanent Rhine crossing was available in the Worms area with the
makeshift Rhine Bridge in Worms, which at the time served as a railway
and road bridge. Finally by the fall of 1950, preparatory work for the
new building of a bridge began. The severely damaged eastern gate tower
from where I took the photo on the right bank of the Rhine above the
roadway was removed, whilst the three-story high base below the roadway
was preserved. Still, the "old" Nibelungen Bridge could not cope with
the increase in traffic between 1953 and 2005, which is why it was
heavily overloaded at peak times and in the meantime also in need of
renovation. It was closed to traffic from September 16, 2008 until
September 12, 2013, when the "new" bridge that was being built at the
same time was opened for traffic, when rehabilitation work began. On
April 3, 2019, the Worms Mobility Agency announced that it would start
planning a replacement for the old Nibelungen Bridge, the construction
of which is planned from 2025 whilst retaining the older ramps and the
Nibelungen Tower.
.gif)
The Nazi flags outside the main railway station have now been replaced by gay flags. As
can be surmised by such contrasting images taken at the same location,
Worms had been largely destroyed by two Allied bombing raids on February
21 and March 18, 1945. The British air raid of February 21, 1945
targeted the main train station on the outskirts of the city centre and
the chemical factories southwest of the town centre, but also destroyed
large parts of the city centre, including the Trinity Church, built in
1709-1725, which burned out completely except for the outer walls and
parts of the tower. Worms Cathedral was also set on fire. 239 residents
died. The American attack of March 18, 1945 killed 141 people. The
attacks left about 15,000 residents homeless. 35% of the building stock
was completely destroyed, another 29% damaged to varying degrees. The
inner city was rebuilt after the war in a largely modern (ie:
unappealing) style.
Iron benchmark featuring the Nazi eagle affixed onto Worms's cathedral. As Taff Simon of Dark History Tours
tells me, such benchmarks are 'like the "Crows Foot" you see on
building in the UK - the Ordnance mark - because the Ordnance Survey
mapped the UK. If I recall, the top of the bit which attaches in to the
wall will have had a known height above sea level. The surveyor with
their theodolite or dumpy level needs to know how high off the ground
the instrument is. Their buddy will have a large scale ruler which is
placed atop of the bit which goes into the wall. Add that known height
which the value you read through the level and that is the height of
your level."
As
mentioned above, the cathedral had been bombed but, although the roofs
burned down, the vaults (renewed after 1698) remained intact. Steel
material from the Gernsheim Rhine Bridge, which was blown up in 1945,
was reused when the roof structure was rebuilt.
Speyer
The
rathaus in 1933 bedecked with the old Wilhelmine and Nazi flags and
today with the red ensign from my bike. In the early summer of 1919,
there had been attempted a coup in Speyer for an autonomous Palatinate
which ended up failing miserably, mainly due to the resistance
of the Deputy District President Friedrich von Chlingensperg auf Berg.
In 1930 the French occupation forces withdrew. When the Nazis too power
Speyer had initially belonged to the "Gau Rheinpfalz", which was merged
with the Saarland to form the Gau Saar-Pfalz in 1935. The administrative
seat of the district was in Neustadt, which thus outstripped the
Bavarian state seat of government Speyer in importance during the Nazi
era.
The
Speyer synagogue on Heydenreichstrasse was burned down in the November
pogroms on November 9, 1938 and demolished shortly afterwards. Over an
hundred Jews from Speyer and the surrounding area who were no longer
able to escape were killed.
Resistance
to the Nazis was attempted by the Speyer Comradeship group around the
Speyer Social Democrat Jakob Schultheis and his wife Emma.
Apart from the area around the railway station, Speyer suffered no major damage from air raids during the war.
During the war, Speyer was the site of one
of the first encounters between pilots and UFOs, or Foo Fighters as they
were called at the time:
.gif "Altpörtel Speyer with swastikas")
Standing in front of the Altpörtel, and as it appeared in 1939 at the end of the swasika-lined main street; the postwar changes are evident in this comparison. It was at the end of March 1945, Speyer was captured by American troops during Operation Undertone
after withdrawing German troops blew up the Rhine bridge . A Wehrmacht
unit in Speyer fought tenaciously. After the war the city was humiliated
by being part of the French occupation zone and the seat of a French
garrison. The establishment of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate was
ordered on August 30, 1946 as the last state in the western occupation
zones by decree No. 57 of the French military government under General
Marie-Pierre Kœnig. The occupation regime ended on May 6, 1955
 |
| Einst und jetzt... |
In an encounter on November 27, 1944 over Speyer, pilots Henry Giblin and Walter Cleary reported a large orange light flying at 250 mph about 1,500 feet above their fighter. The radar station in the sector replied that there was nothing else there. Nevertheless, a subsequent malfunction in the plane's radar system forced it to return to base. An official report was made - the first of its kind - which resulted in many jokes at the pilots' expense. After the 27 November encounter, pilots who saw the Foo Fighters decided not to include them in their flight reports.
.gif "Altpörtel Speyer with swastikas")
Trier (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Hitler being driven down Kölner Straße in May, 1939. The local group of the Nazi Party was founded on November 26, 1925, which
at that time consisted of nine members. Development was slow, so that
the now 22 members were threatened with collapse in 1928 before the
later Gauleiter of Trier, Gustav Simon, took over the leadership of the
local group in 1930 and reorganised it. In the years that followed,
membership grew rapidly, mainly due to the withdrawal of French troops
from the Rhineland. A rapidly deteriorating economic situation also
played an important role; in Trier, for example, around 15,000 people
were unemployed at the beginning of 1932 and around 30% of the
population depended on financial support from welfare and government
agencies. As a result, national tendencies gained more and more
influence and with it so did the Nazi Party. The number of members had
increased in 1932 to about 900 members distributed over six local
groups. The election results reflected this, the distribution of votes
for the Nazi Party rose from 2.6% to 30% in the period from 1929 to
1933. However, it was still inferior to the Centre Party, which
consistently had the support of the mid to upper 40% of the electorate.
This increase from the initial 1.4% in 1928 to 31.9% in 1933 was also
recorded in the Reichstag elections.
The
Gasthaus "Zur Glocke" on Glockenstraße shown on the left. It had been owned by a Nazi
activist and was a meeting place for them where they instigated attacks
on political opponents. |
The Speyerer Tor and
today. |
The Kemmelkarne on the Petrisberg, set up by the Nazis in 1938, became a notorious prison camp during the war, Stalag
XII, in which mainly French prisoners of war were accommodated. The
synagogue was desecrated by the Nazis in the Reichspogromnacht in 1938
and completely destroyed by a bomb attack in 1944. On June 16, 1936 the
city of Trier signed a contract with the German Reichsministerium für
Wissenschaft, Bildung und Volksbildung to build a teacher training centre. Trier thus became again a university town after 138 years. The Teacher Training Centre
was opened in the summer of 1936 with the presence of Reich Minister of
Education, Bernhard Rust, with a large, two-day celebration and a
strong Nazi celebration. The buildings erected for the Teacher Training Centre
on the Schneidershof are largely preserved and today the buildings J,
K, L, O, T (Gymnasium) and today's nursery of the Trier University of
Applied Sciences remain.
.gif "Gestapo Reichsbahngebäude Christophstraße 1")
In 1935 the Gestapo moved its offices here
at the former Reichsbahngebäude at Christophstraße 1. Here it had its
offices and interrogation rooms near the train station on the first
floor, later also on the second floor. Heavy bomb hits at the beginning
of October 1944 made it necessary to relocate the office to Olewig for a
short time, from where it finally moved to Zeltingen (Moselle) at
Christmas 1944. Until now, little was known about the activities of the
State Police Office in Trier, since its files have not been preserved.
Closed archival records are almost completely absent. The fact that the
Gestapo Trier was involved in criminal acts in a variety of ways is proven by numerous individual examples
such as the eyewitness reports from the persecuted, who report
mistreatment by the Gestapo in the rooms of the Reichsbahn headquarters
building. There was also an organisational and personal connection to
the nearby ϟϟ
special camp/Hinzert concentration camp. The 'interrogation squad'
there was made up of Gestapo officials in Trier and Luxembourg. Force
was often used against detainees to extract confessions during 'enhanced
interrogations'. An event on October 16, 1941 proves that the Trier
Gestapo acted as the lynchpin for the camp in Hinzert. On that day,
officials from the Trier Gestapo picked up seventy Soviet prisoners of
war from a work detail at the Baumholder military training area in order
to take them to Hinzert, where they were murdered immediately after
their arrival by injecting a cyanide solution. Isolated source editions
that provide insight into the activitiesIts employees would later find employment within the West German state in the post-war period..gif "Simeonstraße in 1939 Trier hackenkreuz")
Simeonstraße
in 1939 and today with the Porta Nigra behind. The Porta Nigra (Black
Gate) at Trier is one of the most impressive examples of Late Roman
fortification. Trier was frequently used as a capital by western
emperors and was consequently developed on a grand scale. The
construction of the city gate began in 170 CE as the northern entrance
to the city of Augusta Treverorum. The dating of the gate was disputed
for a long time and ranged from the 2nd to the 4th centuries. In January
2018, the start of construction could be fixed at 170 based on a
dendrochronological examination of wooden remains of the city wall. In
various places there are signs carved into the stones, some of which are
upside down which are probably stonemason's marks that help to
reconstruct the construction of the gate. The signs in the west tower
contain dates, but without a year, so that an absolute dating of the
Porta Nigra is not possible. However, the marks can be used to estimate
the time it took to build the gate, as they marked several continuous
blocks lying one on top of the other. Taking into account a sensible
subdivision into construction lots and excluding the winter as a
construction time, then the Porta Nigra would have been completed within
two to four years. .gif "Hitler Porta Nigra")
The construction started under Emperor Marcus Aurelius was never finally completed.
.gif "Hitler Porta Nigra")
Using Trier as his base of operations, Constantine the Great campaigned successfully
against the Franks in 306–7 and against the Bructeri (north of the
Ruhr) the next year. Two Frankish kings captured in the course of the
former campaign he fed to the beasts in the amphitheatre of Trier. Today
any visitor, even one with only a minimal knowledge of or interest in
Roman history, can still see the evidence of the city’s former imperial
splendour. Trier’s most famous landmark, the Porta Nigra, dates from the
second century, as do the Roman bridge across the Mosel and the Baths
of St Barbara; the amphitheatre was constructed even earlier, at the end
of the first century.
As in other cities, institutions, schools, public squares or streets were renamed after prominent Nazis, and so Porta-Nigra-Platz was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz in 1933 after Hitler was made an honorary citizen. .gif "Hitler Porta Nigra")
In
addition to holding party events and commemorative days, this was one
of the measures taken by the Nazi Party to change the character of Trier
into that of a cultural model city; according to Gauleiter Gustav
Simon, Trier was to be a "bulwark of National Socialism".
Plans were also developed to carry out a series of building projects
which were intended to consolidate and strengthen this new character.
However, the planning periods fell on the time of the war, which is why
only two of the scheduled projects were implemented- the Gaubräute
Schule (established in 1942 at Ramstein Castle) and the College for
Teacher Education (after being temporarily closed, in operation from
1941 to 1944). Both institutions aimed to convey Nazi ideological ideals
to young men and women.
.gif "Hitler Porta Nigra")
In
addition to holding party events and commemorative days, this was one
of the measures taken by the Nazi Party to change the character of Trier
into that of a cultural model city; according to Gauleiter Gustav
Simon, Trier was to be a "bulwark of National Socialism".
Plans were also developed to carry out a series of building projects
which were intended to consolidate and strengthen this new character.
However, the planning periods fell on the time of the war, which is why
only two of the scheduled projects were implemented- the Gaubräute
Schule (established in 1942 at Ramstein Castle) and the College for
Teacher Education (after being temporarily closed, in operation from
1941 to 1944). Both institutions aimed to convey Nazi ideological ideals
to young men and women.On a recent Sunday afternoon in front of the Porta Nigra which the Trier police described as a "macabre case"
in their report, a tour guide of a group of about ten is said to be in
front of the landmark in the city for about ten minutes in the pose of
the Hitler salute. This came soon after an innkeeper in Trier landed in
court because he had advertised "Hitler apple strudel" baked with "Jewish blood in gas" for "88 Reichsmarks" on his terrace in a Trier allotment garden .
On March 31, 2022 the district court in Trier has sentenced the
40-year-old former innkeeper to five months' imprisonment on probation
and to paying 800 euros to a charitable organisation for incitement to
hatred.
Nazi propaganda at the cathedral on the Domfreihof reading "Deutsche Jungens und Mädels meidet die konfessionellen Jugendverbände"("German boys and girls- avoid confessional youth organisations." By 1937 all Catholic youth organisations would be banned.
The usurpation by force of the leadership of the Reich Committee of the German Youth Associations (Reichsausschluß deutscher Jugendverbände) on April 5, 1933, the umbrella organisation for all youth organisations in Germany, with a total membership of between five and six million young people, marked the beginning of Gleichschaltung of the political, religious, and youth movement–oriented youth organisations, their disbanding or forced transfer into the Hitler Youth. This led to a signicant increase in the Hitler Youth membership ranks and at the same time augmented the ranks of the league. The Hitler Youth continued to expand its sphere of power. For example, an agreement signed with the Reich sports leader (Reichssportführer) made it possible by 1936 to construct an organizational nexus, making any individual activity in sports dependent for all practical purposes on concomitant membership in the Hitler Youth. Similar agreements existed with the Reich Ministry for Nutrition (Reichsnährstand), the organization of National Socialist female students (Arbeitsgemeinschaft nationalsozialistischer Studentinnen, or ANSt), the National Socialist Welfare Organization (NSV), and the National Socialist Labour Organization (DAF). By binding more and more activities and interests to compulsory membership in the Hitler Youth, the net of inclusion became ever tighter and more closely meshed.
Dagmar Reese (32-33) Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany
In Sichelstraße the former Bishop-Korum-house served as a gaol for collecting Jewish women and children beginning April 1942.
The building itself had been built in 1929 by the Catholic Church as a
centre for Catholic youth with a large hall, group rooms and a souvenir
shop and is named after Bishop Michael Felix Korum, who presided over
the Trier diocese from 1881 to 1921. In 1937 the Bishop Korum House was
confiscated by the Nazis, and between 1941 and 1943 it was repeatedly
used as a collective gaol for Jewish women and children and sometimes
also for Jewish men before their deportation to the East. 
Jewish
women and men had to gather here, were guarded and forced to sign
documents by which all their belongings, their cash, their assets, their
real estate, if they owned any, fell to the German Reich because they
were considered enemies of the state.
Jewish
women and men had to gather here, were guarded and forced to sign
documents by which all their belongings, their cash, their assets, their
real estate, if they owned any, fell to the German Reich because they
were considered enemies of the state. A mounted plaque on the site commemorates this doleful event shown on the left. At this point was 1929-1931 at the initiative of the "Marian Jünglingscongregation" (MJC), a Catholic youth organisation, established the so-called Bishop-Korum-house, which was demolished in the 1960s and replaced with the current building. From 1942 it served as a rallying point of the female Jewish prisoners prior to their deportation to concentration camps Lublin, Theresienstadt or Auschwitz.
The Karl Marx House is where Karl Marx was born in 1818; it is now a museum. The significance of the house went unnoticed until 1904,
at which point the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) worked hard
to buy it, succeeding in 1928. After the Nazis came to power the
building was confiscated and turned into a printing house. Here the
corpse of the first victim of the Nazis, Social Democrat Hermann
Möschel, was laid out in 1932. On March 8, 1933 over an hundred SA and ϟϟ
men stormed the building, tore down the imperial flag replacing it with
the swastika flag drove out the Socialists. The Karl Marx House was
first occupied by the police then confiscated by the Nazis, and
finally, on May 4, 1933 became the headquarters of their party newspaper
"Der Stürmer."
...some buildings still physically in existence after 1933 also disappeared from tourist literature. The Reich Committee for Tourism chastised the Trier Tourism Office for distributing a brochure that alluded to the house in which the ‘famous German Socialist Karl Marx was born’. The Committee therefore ordered the immediate destruction of material making such references to the ‘Marxist-liberalist past’
The Nazis' local group in Trier was founded in November 1925. In May 1930 there were only 150 members which rose to 800 in 1932. There had been increased interest from small and medium-sized businessmen. In 1931 about 35% of Nazi members belonged to the middle class. The Trier retailers had already founded a "trade and trade union" around 1900, in which the small and medium-sized shopkeepers opposed the supposed "growing pressure of the department stores" - which were mostly Jewish - under the motto "Our greatest enemy is the Department store." The National Socialist Handicrafts, Trade and Trade Organisation (NS-Hago) ordered on March 8 and 10, 1933 that individual Jewish shops were to be boycotted. On April 1, 1933, within the framework of the Reichsbundes Generalboykotts, two large Jewish department stores were occupied by Nazi brownshirts including the Kaufhaus Haas. Already one evening before, on March 31, leading Jewish personalities had been taken into so-called "protection" including lawyer Dr. Voremberg as well as Max and Albert Haas. The importance of Haas, founded in 1869, is reflected in the fact that the Reichsregierung allowed her in emergency years after the Great War to make emergency money. In 1929, more than 400 employees worked in the largest department store in the government district of Trier. After the Nazis had made a further step of escalation in April 1935, many "new" firms claimed that they were now "German shops": Schuhhaus Hans Klodt, formerly a Jewish business haul in Brotstrasse 44; The "Geschwister Schiefelbusch" took over the handicraft business A. Schapira in Grabenstraße 16; Simon Reilinger's Jewish women's confectionery shop in Brotstraße 8/9 took over the "Geschwisterskanz"; the Wollgeschäft Ernst Ermann in Fleischstraße 2 to 4 became "Geschwister Nees".
The
synagogue in 1944 and today. On the morning of November 10, 1938 it was
plundered and the interior destroyed.
Twenty-three of the twenty-four
Torah scrolls were burned, and over an hundred Jewish men were arrested
that day and gaoled. The synagogue and an adjacent residential house
where the family of Chief Rabbi Dr. Altmann lived, were sold in 1939 and
by 1944 were completely destroyed by bombing. Jewish men and women were
then forced to do forced labour if they were able to work which, for
men from Trier, this meant building roads, whilst women had to work in
viticulture. Furthermore, freedom of movement was restricted, leaving
the city was only allowed with a permit from the local police station
and there was a curfew in the evenings. Eventually over 400 Jews were
deported from Trier between October 1941 and June 1943. The transports
went to Lodz, "Bohemia/Moravia", to the concentration camp
"Theresienstadt" and "unknown" (this turned out to be Auschwitz).
Research today assumes that about 650 Jews from Trier and the surrounding area were killed.
As far as is known, thirty survived, twenty returned to Trier and
fourteen founded the Jewish Community of Trier. One of the most
impressive documents telling of the deportation from Trier comes from Erich Süßkind:
On 27 February 1943 at dawn I was arrested together with my wife and my underage son. I myself, like all Jewish men at that time, was sent to the Windstraße prison, while my wife and son were taken with the other Jewish women and children to the Bishop Korum House, where they were under the guard of the ϟϟ. Then, on 1 March 1943, we were all loaded into railway passenger cars. The transport went first to Dortmund. There all the Jews from Trier - men, women and children - were taken to the city slaughterhouse, where Jews from other cities were already waiting. A new transport was put together. Crammed into cattle cars, the train left on 2 March for Auschwitz, where it arrived on 3 March. During the journey there was nothing to eat and nothing to drink. In Auschwitz, the women and children were first separated from the men. That was the last time I saw my wife and son on the ramp.
The
Hauptmarkt, scene of street battles between Nazis and Communists, in
1935 and today with St. Gangolf church in the background. From
September 1944 onwards, the city was not far from the front line, and
was shot almost daily by American artillery. In December 1944, there
were three heavy air raids on the Trier allies. On December 19, thirty
British Lancaster bombers dropped 136 tonnes of explosive bombs
across the city. Two days later on December 21, 1944, around 14.35, 94
of Lancaster bombers and 47 American bombers were dropped 427 tonnes of
bombs (explosive, fire and napalm bombs). Two days later, on December
23, 700 tonnes of bombshell were dropped to the city. According to
research by the local researcher Adolf Welter, at least 420 people died
during these December attacks in Trier. Numerous buildings were damaged.
On December 24, 1944 American B-26 attacked the Pfalzel Bridge. During
the war, 1600 houses were completely destroyed. On the evening of March
1, 1945, the task force Richardson started towards Trier. A clear full
moon night offered favourable visibility as just before midnight they reached the city. A surprised company with four armed
gunmen capitulated without a shot. Richardson divided his troops into
two halves and sent them both to a Mosel bridge. 
The northern team found
'its' bridge already blown up. Meanwhile the Kaiserbrücke team reported that the the Römerbrücke, Germany's oldest standing bridge- it had stood for almost 2,000 years and is shown on August 27, 1941 and today on the right-was intact. Colonel Richardson drove himself in
a tank to the bridge where his men were fired with light weapons from
the other bank. He directed machine-gun fire from his tank to the other
end of the bridge and ordered an infantry and an armoured
group to advance across the bridge. When the infantrymen did so, a
German major and five soldiers with burning detonators and an igniter
ran toward the bridge but they were not able to explode. On March 2, 1945, the city fell into the hands of the Allies without heavy fighting.
American troops crossing the Amis Bridge in 1945
Then and now; only the buildings at the far right provide historical continuity
Hitlerstraße is now Bahnhofstraße
Grabenstraße after the war and today and a memorial
for the ubiquitous "victims of National Socialism", so vague that it
could refer to practically to anyone and everyone.
Braubach
 |
Before the war and the wife at the same spot eighty years later. A rumour had spread that Standartenführer Julius Uhl had
planned to shoot Hitler on July 1, 1934 here at a concert of the singer
Heinrich Schlusnus. Hitler himself referred to this in his July 13,
1934 speech to the Reichstag justifying his slaughter of his own men
during the so-called Night of the Long Knives when he spoke of how
the man had already been hired in the meantime who was to carry out my elimination at a later date: Standartenführer Uhl, who confessed only a few hours before his death that he had been willing to carry out such an order.
Uhl
in fact had been in Bad Wiessee when he was arrested on June 30 and
taken to Stadelheim Prison. Apparently, "Uhl was chosen to play the
leading role in Hitler’s concocted assassination plot due to his
well-known prowess as a brilliant marksman" (Domarus, 496).
Bacharach
The
wife again at Stahleck Castle overlooking the Rhine and as it appeared
at the start of Nazi rule when this 12th-century fortified castle was
completely rebuilt, providing 260 beds to the hostel using the site. The
ceremonial laying of its foundation stone took place on November 18, 1934.
The work, which took only eleven months, cost 25,000 reichsmarks and
included addition of a kitchen, another Fachwerk building, on the south
side. On October 25, 1935, the rebuilt building was officially
dedicated. In the presence of members of the Hitler Jugend, the
Deutsches Jungvolk, the Bund Deutscher Mädel, and both the SA and the ϟϟ, Gauleiter Gustav Simon gave the dedicatory address. Stahleck became one of 27 Jugendburgen to be used for indoctrination of teenagers and young adults.
By early 1938 the turrets on the shield wall were built and its chemin
de ronde roofed over. A visit by Rudolf Hess in June 1938 prompted the
start of work to complete the rebuilding of the keep, which was still a
ruined stump. The plan was to reconstruct it to a height of 36 metres
and, seven storeys, and name it the Rudolf Hess Tower. However, the
existing foundations would not have been able to bear the weight, so the
ruin was pulled down, and in November 1938, work began on a completely
new tower. Work on this was interrupted by the outbreak of the war. From
1940 to 1942, the castle served as a military hospital. In addition, in
November 1940, students from now occupied Luxembourg who had been
studying at German and Austrian universities when the war began were
forced to attend re-education classes there, and eventually a youth
re-education camp was set up. .gif)
Male
schoolchildren and students from Esch-sur-Alzette and Echternach were
interned at the castle for four months as punishment for protesting
against the announcement in 1942 of the introduction of required
military service in Luxembourg and the forced conscription associated
with it, as well as for participating in the general strike which
followed. (Girls were sent to a youth hostel at Adenau.) Those of
military age were then sent to the front; a memorial plaque at the
castle commemorates this as seen here beside my GIF of Nazis in the
courtyard and the site today. A tin badge shows the castle at the top over the words “Jugendburg Stahleck” and “25 Jahre 1911
1936 Rhineland”. The central triangle reads “DJH”.
Beginning in January 1943, the castle was used as an internment camp for German youth who had shown insufficient loyalty to the Party, such as the founders of the Catholic youth resistance group the Michael Troop; some were taken from Stahleck to concentration camps. From June 1943 to summer 1944, it was a work and military training camp for Germans between 14 and 18 years of age.
.gif)
Beginning in January 1943, the castle was used as an internment camp for German youth who had shown insufficient loyalty to the Party, such as the founders of the Catholic youth resistance group the Michael Troop; some were taken from Stahleck to concentration camps. From June 1943 to summer 1944, it was a work and military training camp for Germans between 14 and 18 years of age.
Landau in der Pfalz
The
post office on the former Adolf-Hitler-Straße. Landau traditionally
relied on the military for its development; extensive barracks were
built for the 5th and 12th field artillery regiments and the 18th and
23rd infantry regiments. During the war Landau was targeted no less than
35 times by Allied, particularly American, air raids. The heaviest took
place on "Black Friday", March 16, 1945 when a total of 1,045 tonnes of
bombs were dropped on Landau leading to 40% of the town being destroyed
and 586 people killed.
Following the end of the war, Landau was an important barracks town for
the French occupiers whose control, as usual, came under attack for its
incompetence which led to significant loss of life.
No German accounting of the foreign exports was permitted by the French, who took the goods, at prices they set themselves, and paid not in the precious dollars received, but in marks, thus depriving the Germans of the one way they had to buy foreign food. For all these reasons, 'population losses were significant', according to the American writer F. Roy Willis. The death rate for the town of Landau in the Rheinland-Pfalz was 39.5% in 1946, which was more than triple the pre-war rate. In 1947, it was 27%, more than double the pre-war rate.
The
Weintor, built in the autumn of 1936, marks the start of the
Weinstrasse in the south of the Palatinate, less than a mile from the
French border. It had been created as part of an economic initiative by
the Nazi government in the 1930s. at a time when the wine industry in
the Palatinate wine region was in crisis. A wine harvest more than twice
as large as usual had caused prices to crash by 1934. Government policy
had compounded the industry's difficulties by forbidding the business
activities of Jewish wine traders, who had hitherto provided a vital
commercial link for the wineries. Party leaders came up with the idea of
the German Wine Route, with the imposing "Weintor" at its southern end,
as a way to increase general awareness of the region's wineries and to
boost employment in the tourism sector locally. The regional Gauleiter,
Josef Bürckel, produced an appropriately bombastic speech entitled "Kampf und Volk – Wein und Wahrheit" on October 19, 1935 as part of the official opening of the German Wine Route.
The
"Weintor" was clearly visible from across the frontier, and the
Gauleiter's speech contrasted the activist policy of the national
government with the economic turmoil in nearby France, then
experiencing, nationally, a particularly savage and destructive bout of
industrial unrest and economic gloom. Press reports of the opening
ceremony wrote of it as a form of "Weihe" (consecration). At this time
the Weintor in Schweigen was a provisional timber structure. At
Grünstadt, near the northern end of the "Wine Route" a second "Weintor",
this one of Papier-mâché, had been erected. As part of the ceremony a
column of 300 vehicles drove the length of the German Wine Route in
convoy, from south to north, but not before a single engined airplane
had flown its entire length. The stone-clad "Weintor" was finally built
in 1936 after an architectural competition for its design was won by
August Josef Peter and Karl Mittel from Landau. The foundation stone was laid on
August 27, 1936, and less than two months later, on October 18, it was
formally inaugurated. Citizens of Wissembourg, which since 1919 had been
part of France, enjoyed the fine view on the north side of their town,
of a large two-headed imperial eagle carved on one side of the
"Weintor", clutching a huge swastika in its talons. In France this was
seen as provocative. After the war ended, in 1945, the huge stone swastika was cut away.
Frankenthal
In
1938 the Jewish synagogue, built in 1884, was burnt to the ground
during the Reichskristallnacht. Today the family name "Frankenthal" is
attested amongst people scattered in many countries - especially among
Jews - and indicates an ultimate origin of the family in the town,
though it might be centuries old and leaving no memory other than the
name. During the war the prisoners of war were held here at Stalag XII B in Frankenthal. In 1940, a forced labour camp was operated for several months as an outside camp of the ϟϟ
special camp Hinzert (concentration camp) in Mörsch, the prisoners of
which were employed in the highway construction (today's A 6). 
On September 23, 1943, Frankenthal was heavily destroyed by bombs and lost a large part of its older buildings. In
1945, at the end of the war, its industries in ruins, it was
occupied first by the Americans and then by the French by way of
ultimate humiliation. The city was
rebuilt in the post-war period, like many others, in functional, but
unadorned architecture. This is all the more melancholy when considering
the description by the poet August von Platen in 1815 that Frankenthal is a "beautifully built town, one of the most beautiful in the whole of the Palatinate."
The Frankenthaler Brauhauskeller, where Hitler stayed in April, 1931. The day before his appointment as chancellor a procession of more than 2,500 SA and ϟϟ
members as well as members of the Hitler Youth from Frankenthal,
Ludwigshafen and Worms marched through the streets of the city. On the
market square, today's town hall square, they marched past the
Palatinate Gauleiter Josef Bürckel. The march, reported the "Frankenthaler Zeitung",
attracted a large crowd, "also from abroad". A couple of days later an
appeal by the Frankenthal local group of the Stahlhelm, a right-wing
extremist paramilitary military association, was made in the "Münchner
Kindl". The leader of the local group was the teacher and artist Martin
Jais declaring how Germany had to free itself from the "disgrace" of the
Versailles Treaty through "fight and sacrifice". Jais is still a
respected artist in Frankenthal today whilst his right-wing extremist
past is usually kept secret. On February 21, 1933 the Nazis organised a
public meeting here, attended by 200 people, half of whom were women.
Women participated in such a large number, because Tuesday evenings at
the Brauhauskeller was always when the "knitting and Flickstunde" of the
Nazi female members took place. That same evening supporters of the
Christian Social Service (CSVD), a strongly
Christian-Protestant-conservative party, gathered in the restaurant "Ax" on Speyerer Straße.
According to the speaker, Professor Risch from Speyer, the cause of the
economic crisis is the "removal of God from the acquisition and public
life and the worship of mammon". The leader of the CSVD in Frankenthal
was the well-known saddler and presbyter Jakob Schatz.
On September 23, 1943, Frankenthal was heavily destroyed by bombs and lost a large part of its older buildings. In
1945, at the end of the war, its industries in ruins, it was
occupied first by the Americans and then by the French by way of
ultimate humiliation. The city was
rebuilt in the post-war period, like many others, in functional, but
unadorned architecture. This is all the more melancholy when considering
the description by the poet August von Platen in 1815 that Frankenthal is a "beautifully built town, one of the most beautiful in the whole of the Palatinate." 
Mainz
In
1929 and today. After the Great War the French occupied Mainz between
1919 and 1930 according to the Treaty of Versailles which went into
effect June 28, 1919. The Rhineland (in which Mainz is located) was to
be a demilitarized zone until 1935 and the French garrison, representing
the Triple Entente, was to stay until reparations were paid. In 1923
Mainz participated in the Rhineland separatist movement that proclaimed a
republic in the Rhineland. It collapsed in 1924. The French withdrew on
June 30, 1930. Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January,
1933 and his political opponents, especially those of the Social
Democratic Party, were either incarcerated or murdered. Some were able
to move away from Mainz in time. One was the political organizer for the
SPD, Friedrich Kellner, who went to Laubach, where as the chief justice
inspector of the district court he continued his opposition against the
Nazis by recording their misdeeds in a 900-page diary.
 |
| Schusterstrasse then and now |
During
the war, more than thirty air raids destroyed about 80 percent of the
city's centre, including most of the historic buildings. Mainz was
captured on March 22, 1945 against uneven German resistance (staunch in
some sectors and weak in other parts of the city) by the 90th Infantry
Division under William A. McNulty, a formation of the XII Corps under
Third Army commanded by Patton who had used the ancient strategic
gateway through Germania Superior
to cross the Rhine south of Mainz, drive down the Danube towards
Czechoslovakia and end the possibility of a Bavarian redoubt crossing
the Alps in Austria when the war ended. With regard to the Roman road
over which Patton attacked Trier, he said:
one could almost smell the coppery sweat and see the low dust clouds where those stark fighters moved forward into battle.
 |
| The main railway station |
 |
| The Eisenbahnbrücke 1942 and today |
MacDonogh (276-277) After the Reich- The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation
President
Hindenberg in July 1930 at a swastika-bedecked Schillerplatz, the
Befreiungsdenkmal now replaced with the Fastnachtsbrunnen. The statue
itself, Benno Elkan's "Rhenania" (representing
a Rhineland freed from French brutality) was destroyed by the Nazis
because of the Jewish background of the artist in late March 1933. Elkan
then fled Germany and emigrated to England,
where he lived until his death in 1960, becoming an Officer of the
British Empire in recognition of his contribution to British art. In
gratitude to the British for saving those targeted by continental
European fascism, Elkan created a large Menorah featuring scenes from
the Passion of the Jewish people. As a gift of the British Parliament,
it is now before the Knesset in Jerusalem.
When they took power, the Nazis destroyed the huge memorial to Gustav Stresemann at Fischtrplatz.
Hitler speaking at the fussballplatz June 13, 1932
The marktplatz before the war, September 1942, and today
Annweiler am Trifels
Down the hauptstrasse then and now.
On the Sonnenberg behind the town lie the ruins of the castle of
Trifels, in which Richard the Lionheart was imprisoned after he was
captured by Duke Leopold V of Austria near Vienna in December 1192 on
his return from the Third Crusade. Handed over to Emperor Henry VI of
Hohenstaufen, he spent a period of three weeks of captivity at Trifels from March 31 to April 19, 1193. According
to one legend, Richard was found by the troubadour Blondel de Nesle,
who reported the king's location to his friends; in fact, Richard's
location was not a secret.
The
Nazi era reconstruction in 1938-1942 utilised in part the preserved
walls from the Middle Ages or those found by archaeological
investigations in 1935-1937, but also in many cases rigorously ignored
the original medieval findings and created essentially an architectural
reinterpretation of the 20th century. Therefore the present-day castle
is in large parts not true to the mediæval original, being characterised
by a large well tower outside the ring wall, linked to the castle by a
bridge.
Neuwied
Linz am Rhein
In
kreis Neuwied, the Rheintor at Burgplatz then and now, with a different
flag flying. After the Treaty of Versailles came into force in 1920,
Linz was initially part of the unoccupied territory in the Rhineland.
The border to the ten-year occupation zone ran south of Linz near
Ariendorf over the Linzer Höhe. As a result of the Ruhr crisis, Linz was
occupied by French troops from February 1923 as part of the so-called "Einbruchsgebiet"
in the southern Sieg district and northern Neuwied districtcleared the
break-in area on November 17, 1924. Paul Freiherr Eltz von Rübenach, who
had served as Reich Minister of Postal Services and Transportation from
1932 to 1937, died in the town in 1943. After the war Linz became a
part of Rhineland-Palatinate in 1946.
.gif "Koblenz unter dem Hackenkreuz Nazi")
View
of Koblenz with the Deutsches Eck from Ehrenbreitstein Fortress. In
1925 the local Nazi Party was founded in Coblenz. On March 27, 1929
Gauleiter Robert Ley appointed the ambitious commercial teacher Gustav
Simon to be the district leader, who moved to Koblenz and reestablished the divided local group.
Even in the Reichstag elections on May 20, 1928, the Nazis had been
able to celebrate a remarkable electoral success despite internal
quarrels. From the outset they had achieved four times the Reich result
with 10.4% of the votes and trumped the communists by more than 1,000
votes. Simon's tireless activities bore their first fruits in the local
elections on November 17, 1929 when the Nazis were able to win a
sensational 18.1% of the votes with a low turnout of only 55%, thus
providing eight of the 44 city councillors. Unlike elsewhere, the
Catholic denomination of the majority of Koblenz residents did not prove
to be a factor of resistance to the Nazis. From June 2, 1930, the new
party organ, the Koblenzer Nationalblatt, supported the party's
aggressive agitation. A year later, Simon was able to record a personal
triumph: for months, against the declared will of his angry former
sponsor, Gauleiter Ley, he had worked to form a new district. Thus on
May 31, 1931, the division of the Gau Rhineland was completed and Simon
became Gauleiter of the new Gau Koblenz-Trier. Meanwhile, the city of
Koblenz, now also the district capital, was struggling with increasing
financial problems. The increasing number of the so-called welfare
unemployed caused the burden of welfare to explode and further
restricted the scope of local self-government financially.
The
local Nazi Party celebrated Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on
January 30, 1933 with a large rally at Deutsches Eck. The first
consequences of the change of power in Berlin were not long in coming in
Koblenz either: the street terror spread with the KPD and SPD whilst
moderates also felt the effects of the first measures of persecution. On
February 13, Chief of Police Ernst Biesten, a staunch opponent of the
Nazis, was forced to leave. In the Reichstag elections on March 5, 1933,
the Nazis won 41.2% of the votes, whilst the Centre could only win
31.4% with an extraordinarily high turnout of 92.5%. The previous
non-voters made a major contribution to the success of the right, which
was rounded off by the 8.4% share of the vote for the electoral alliance
Kampffront Schwarz-weiß-Rot. On March 8, the Nazi flag was illegally
hoisted on public buildings in Koblenz, as it was everywhere in Germany. .gif "Raising Nazi flag Coblenz")
The hoisting on the town hall on March 8 at Jesuitenplatz shown
on the right happened despite the express protest of Mayor Rosendahl,
who was taken from his office by SA men under threat of violence to
attend the ceremony from a window in the large meeting room. From a
balcony opposite, Nazi city councillor Karl Carius and parliamentary
group leader Ludwig Christ made diatribes about Rosendahl and declared
the actual end of his term in office. Local elections were held on March
12, the day of commemoration, which also ended with a clear shift to
the right: the NSDAP was the strongest party with 42%, ahead of the
Centre with 34.3 percent of the vote, the German bloc black-white-red
scored 10.7 percent. The Nazis were able to improve their seats on 19
out of 44 city councils, whilst the Centre only had 15 seats. Rosendahl
went on vacation on March 15; on the same date he was placed on leave by
decree of the Prussian Minister of the Interior, Hermann Göring.
.gif "Raising Nazi flag Coblenz")
The hoisting on the town hall on March 8 at Jesuitenplatz shown
on the right happened despite the express protest of Mayor Rosendahl,
who was taken from his office by SA men under threat of violence to
attend the ceremony from a window in the large meeting room. From a
balcony opposite, Nazi city councillor Karl Carius and parliamentary
group leader Ludwig Christ made diatribes about Rosendahl and declared
the actual end of his term in office. Local elections were held on March
12, the day of commemoration, which also ended with a clear shift to
the right: the NSDAP was the strongest party with 42%, ahead of the
Centre with 34.3 percent of the vote, the German bloc black-white-red
scored 10.7 percent. The Nazis were able to improve their seats on 19
out of 44 city councils, whilst the Centre only had 15 seats. Rosendahl
went on vacation on March 15; on the same date he was placed on leave by
decree of the Prussian Minister of the Interior, Hermann Göring..gif "Kaiser Wilhelm memorial")
The Kaiser Wilhelm memorial with and without swastikas.
After the Great War, the Rhineland was occupied by Allied troops. Koblenz was initially the American, then the French military administration. The last French soldiers left the city at the end of November 1929. Immediately tens of thousands of people gathered at the Deutsches Eck to watch the hoisting of the Reichsflagge at Ehrenbreitstein Fortress. On July 22, 1930, the monument was once again the scene of celebrations after the end of the Allied occupation of the Rhineland. In preparation for this, a total of 28 mushroom lights were permanently installed on the bank and the monument. On this day, President Paul von Hindenburg visited the Deutsches Eck at the end of his journey through the free Rhineland. After a firework display on the Ehrenbreitstein at the conclusion of the celebrations, a catastrophe occurred near the memorial, when a narrow pontoon bridge overloaded with crowds broke in and drowned 38 people.
During the air raids on Koblenz the city centre was devastated. The Kastorkirche and the Deutschherrenhaus were victims of the flames, while the Deutsches Eck remained largely undamaged. Shortly before the end of the war American troops of the 3rd American Army approached the city from the Eifel and began artillery fire . On March 16, 1945, the equestrian statue was hit by an American artillery shell. Whether this was intentional remains unanswered. In connection with the blank claim that Eisenhower had demanded the destruction, said Mario Kramp, more likely was "the fear of the Americans that German soldiers were entrenched in the monument area."
.gif)
.gif)
 |
| The hauptbahnhof August 27, 1941 and today, with the fortress behind |
After the Great War, France occupied the area once again. In defiance of the French, the German populace of the city has insisted on using the more German spelling of Coblenz since 1926. During the war it was the location of the command of German Army Group B and like many other German cities, it was heavily bombed and rebuilt afterwards. Between 1947 and 1950, it served as the seat of government of Rhineland-Palatinate. After the war it was filled in with debris from the bombing of the city. During the war, the palace complex was reduced to a shell by bombs in 1944. It was rebuilt in 1950–51, the exterior being accurately reconstructed using the original plans and the interior finished in 1950s style, except for a few spaces in the centre section whose interiors were reconstructed in the classical style of the palace's original construction.
The
palace bedecked with Nazi flags and an amphitheatrical Thingplatz
theatre in the palace forecourt and today. During the Nazi era, the
Thingplatz was one of the first of a projected 400 to be built; in March
1934 building materials were brought up from the Rhine by citizens,
over an hundred workers began work in two shifts on June 8, a mystical
cornerstone-laying ceremony took place on June 16, and the theatre was
dedicated by Mayor Otto Wittgen on March 24, 1935. The theatre was oval,
330 feet long by 230 feet wide and approximately sixteen feet deep; it
was constructed using 16,000 basalt pillars, seated 20,000 people and
could accommodate a further 80,000 standees in the surrounding areas of
the forecourt. The layout incorporated a glacial boulder and, under the
palace portico, a memorial grotto with an eternal flame. The motto of
the theatre was Leuchte, scheine goldene Sonne über dies befreite Land
(Gleam, shine golden sun, over this liberated land), and a lur was
installed on the palace roof, to be sounded twice daily. It was audible
up to 3.1 miles away. The Koblenz Thingplatz was one of the most
important in the effort to use the locations for mystical observances,
particularly at the summer solstice. However, interest in the Thingspiel
movement waned rapidly, and already at the end of 1937 a contest was
organised to redesign the forecourt as a simple parade ground, doing
away with the amphitheatre; in later years it was mainly used for the
annual May Day ceremonies.
Adolf Hitler Straße then and now. The town has a long history- the name itself is a corruption of the Latin term "Rhenanae Tabernae" which literally means "tavern" and "Rhine". Hence Rheinzabern was founded some 1950 years ago as "Rhenanae Tabernae" as
a place of rest for travellers on Roman roads and was known for its
Samian ware production. Remnants of the production are still visible and
there is a local museum dedicated to pottery and Roman culture.
After the war the town became part of the French occupation zone within the then newly formed state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
Nazi rally outside the Burgkirche on the left and Binger
Straße in 1939 and today, under renovation. After the war, Ingelheim
emerged as the only unscathed town between Mainz and Koblenz.
Remagen
.gif "Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen")
In
the final phase of the Second World War, this was the first Allied
crossing over the Rhine. It gained notoriety through the 1969 film The
Bridge at Remagen. When Army Group B under Field Marshal Walter Model
retreated to the right bank of the Rhine in 1945, the Wehrmacht
leadership wanted all the Rhine bridges to be blown up. For the
Ludendorff Bridge, however, less efficient explosives (300 kg instead of 600 kg of Donarit instead of dynamite) were used. When
blown up, the bridge was briefly out of its bearings having been lifted
but not destroyed, which made it possible for the Anglo-Americans to
cross the Rhine at this point and accelerate their advance towards the
Ruhr area. In the days after the conquest, Wehrmacht soldiers tried in
vain to destroy the bridge. 
It finally collapsed on March 17, 1945,
probably due to the failed detonation and the fighting of the previous
days. Hitler had several officers who were held responsible for the
destruction that did not take place convicted and shot by a court-martial.
It finally collapsed on March 17, 1945,
probably due to the failed detonation and the fighting of the previous
days. Hitler had several officers who were held responsible for the
destruction that did not take place convicted and shot by a court-martial. The
unexpected availability of the first major crossing of the Rhine,
Germany's last major natural barrier and line of defence, caused
Eisenhower to alter his plans to end the war and possibly shortened the
war in Europe. The
ability to quickly establish a bridgehead on the eastern side of the
Rhine and to get forces into Germany allowed American forces to envelop
the German industrial area of the Ruhr more quickly than planned. The
Allies were able to get six divisions across the bridge before it
collapsed on March 17, 1945, ten days after it was captured. The collapse killed eighteen American army engineers.
Schifferstadt
Beilstein
The
Zehnthaus during the Third Reich and today. The municipality had been
the setting for a number of Nazi-era films such as Carl Froelich’s 1936
work Wenn wir alle Engel wären (“If
We Were All Angels”) starring Heinz Rühmann- described by Hull (104) as
"the best comedy of the year which contained a number of racy
situations that would have curled the hair of an American censor- and
the 1938 film Das Verlegenheitskind starring Ida Wüst and Paul
Klinger. Not far from the castle above the town is an old Jewish
Cemetery who graves- many dating back two centuries- are engraved in
Hebrew and topped with stones of remembrance. Beilstein's Jewish
citizens co-existed peacefully within its business and social community
for centuries. At various points in history, Beilstein was able to
shield Jews from anti-Semitism and at one time Beilstein's population
was nearly a quarter Jewish, but the Jewish population began leaving the
area prior to Hitler's rise. Its synagogue was built in 1320 when
German Emperor Henry VII allowed ten Jewish families to settle in
Beilstein and build a synagogue which included a mikveh and women's
gallery as well as the main worship hall. In 1925 the synagogue was sold
for use as a barn and stable (which included a pigsty - with pigs
slaughtered in the mikveh), and thus is one of the very few
to have survived the war relatively intact. In the summer of 1942,
Beilstein’s last Jewish family was deported and died in a Nazi
concentration camp. In the early 1990s an artist whose father from the
town survived the Holocaust bought and restored the building where it
now serves as an art gallery; its third floor is maintained as a small
museum preserving the memory of the city’s Jews.
Laubenheim
.gif)
The
two memorials for fallen soldiers in the cemetery; the older, smaller
monument to the Laubenheimer soldiers fallen during the Franco-Prussian
War was originally on the market square but, under the Nazis, was moved here. The
larger monument was erected for donations from the population and the
local associations for the victims of the Great War and was consecrated
on August 31, 1931, according to the log book of the warriors and
soldiers comrades in Laubenheim on the Rhine "in a distinguished, worthy
manner". The monument was built of limestone and bore on the front a
panel with the names of the fallen. Above the table was the representation of a soldier's head with a steel helmet topped by a pyramid-shaped point with the Iron Cross. Under mayor Wilhelm Spies in 1960 it was covered with marble tiles. Instead
of the nomenclature, a book with the names of the soldiers who had
fallen in the two world wars and the Laubenheimer citizens who had been
killed in the bomb attacks were inserted.
Kallstadt
The
ancestral home of the Heinz and Trump families, two prominent business
and political families in the United States. Donald Trump's paternal
grandfather Frederick was born here
on March 14, 1869, training as a barber before emigrating to the United
States at the age of 16 where he continued his former trade. Several
years later, in 1891, he moved to Seattle and began speculating in real
estate. During the Klondike Gold Rush, Trump travelled to the Yukon
Territory and made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel
for miners in the boomtown of Whitehorse. He eventually returned to
Kallstadt and married Elisabeth Christ, the daughter of a former
neighbour. Because he had fled Bavaria in order to evade conscription,
the Bavarian Government stripped Trump of his citizenship and
permanently banished him following an investigation forcing him and his
family to return to the United States, becoming an American citizen in
1892. He would die in 1918 of the Spanish 'flu. After the war the town
exported coronation wine to Britain in 1953 by which time the Trump
dynasty had become embarrassed about its German roots leading to former
President Trump occasionally styling himself as a quasi-Viking from
Karlstad, Sweden. 