Peenemünde is a peninsula in northern Germany on the Baltic coast. It was here from 1936 that the Nazi regime opened the Peenemünde Army Research Centre and under Wernher von Braun it was where the development of the first rockets took place: the V1 ‘Doodlebug’ and latterly the V2 rocket. The site was heavily bombed once the Allies realised…
Category: Third Reich
Battle Damage: Munich
When you explore Second World War sites across Europe you look at the landscape differently from other visitors: you always have one eye out for visible traces of conflict. In cities this means looking for buildings damaged and repaired or which still bear the scars of war: battle damage. Munich was at the spiritual heartland…
Remagen Bridge
The story of Remagen Bridge is one of the iconic moments of the last months of the Second World War. By March 1945 the German Army was in full retreat with American and British forces pushing from the West and Russian troops advancing in the East. As the final advance on the river Rhine began…
Maisy Battery, Normandy
The Maisy Battery is a privately owned museum in Normandy located between Omaha and Utah beaches in the American D-Day sector. It was a substantial gun battery site equipped with howitzers which could fire onto both beaches and posed a serious threat in the early days of the Normandy invasion. It was bombed from the…
Le Grand Blockhaus
Le Grand Blockhaus Museum at Batz sur Mer was an Observation Post built as part of the Atlantic Wall defences in the area around St Nazaire following the raid on the dry dock by British commandos in March 1942. The bunker was the eyes of a major coastal battery and later formed part of the St…
U Boat Pens, Saint Nazaire
The German U-Boat fleet which fought in the Battle of the Atlantic during the Second World War operated out of a number of bases on the French coast which included Saint Nazaire. Immortalised in the film Das Boot, casualties among the Kriegsmarine who operated the U-Boats were high: a staggering 3 in 4 of the…
Picardy Resistance & Deportation Museum
The Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation de Picardie is a Second World War museum dedicated to the history of the Picardy region of France – which covers the departments of the Aisne, Oise and Somme – under the Nazi occupation from 1940-1944. It looks at resistance to German occupation, the help and…
Siegfried Line, Aachen
The Siegfried Line, or Westwall as the Germans called it, was a 390 mile long defensive wall built in the 1930s to screen Nazi Germany in from an attack from the West and was partially built in reaction to the construction of the French Maginot Line. During the Phoney War in 1939.40 it inspired the famous song…
Bergen-Belsen
On International Women’s Day it is fitting to be sitting writing this at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp where arguably one of the most famous female voices of the Twentieth Century died in 1945: Anne Frank. Her diaries have helped to define our knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust, and for me personally they remain as…
Seelow Heights Battlefield
Today we spent the day looking round the Seelow Heights battlefield which saw fighting from January through to April 1945 when the position finally fell and the road was open to Berlin for the advancing Soviet forces. Like the Oderfront we visited the other day, this is not an area for the casual visitor as…
Oderfront Battlefields
Today we crossed into Poland and had a look at the battlefields along the river Oder on what was known as the Oderfront. This marks the old boundary between Brandenburg and Prussia and today the border between Germany and Poland. Soviet forces reached this area in January 1945 have pushed the Germans back since Operation Bagration…
Zeppelinfeld, Nuremberg
Arguably one of the most iconic structures that remains from the Third Reich period in Germany are the Nazi Party Rally Grounds around the Zeppelinfeld in Nürnberg or Nuremberg. The area was the scene of many Nazi Party rallies and in April 1945 the scene of stiff fighting as US troops spent five days fighting for…
World War 2 Revisited 