Trip to Germany: Drive through Nordlingen and Dachau

This morning we are leaving Rothenburg we start off on autobahn A7.   The Mercedes Van hums along at 160KPH which is 100 MPH, at this speed we are keeping up with traffic.  We then turn on B25 headed for our first stop which is Nordlingen.

Nordlingen is a stop on the Romantic Road which runs from Wurzburg to Fussen.   Nordlingen is another medieval town that is unique in the fact that it sits in a comet impact crater.  From the church tower which we climbed you can see the perfectly round city fortification that was built along the inner ring of the impact crater.

Climbing the church tower provided excellent views of the inner and outer impact crater.   It also provided a view of 2 nesting german Storks. Famous for their house nesting and old wives tale of delivering newborn babies.

Well, we are back on the road again.  We are headed to Dachau the first original German Concentration Camp.  Initially designed for Political Prisoners of the early Nazi Regime.   Dachau was not a death camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka; most of its prisoners would die the old-fashioned way by being worked to death.


 It is a law that all German School Children must visit a concentration camp.  It is something that they never want to happen again, although it already has in other parts of the world. This type of man's inhumanity to fellow man is not strictly a German occurrence,  we are all capable of tremendous horror or good.   It is the circumstances that created this phenomenon is what we must guard against.


Dachau was a sobering tour, we made the final English film which provided a good backdrop on the situation that created the german concentration camp system in Nazi Germany.   We toured the large grounds and cremation ovens where most of the people that went to the camp left though.   After spending a couple of hour here we were off to our final destination in Garmish.

On the way to Garmish we hit Munich exactly at the wrong time, rush hour traffic.  After spend an hour getting through the city but we make it to autobahn A95 and it is smooth sailing to Garnish and the Armed Forces Recreation area there. We arrive around 8 pm and we are all exhausted from a long day of driving and site seeing.  It is good to know that this will be home for the next few days.