Hello All!
Today not directly hobby related (and I'll leave it in English version only this time).
Recently I took an opportunity that all of my four kids were on their summer holidays, and me and my wife took a short holiday in the Polish lake district - Mazury.
Apart of kayaking, cycling and general relaxation with wine, beer and book, we also made a one day road trip around the area and visited various places related to to the HQ of the Third Reich. Very cool though really grim places!
At first we visited Wolfsschance in Gierłoż - Adolf Hitler's headquarters. It's the first time I've seen it, and was astonished with the size of it. The bunkers are massive. In example the footprint of Hermann Goring's bunker is ~450sqm but the actual "usable area" is below 90sqm. The rest are the walls! Despite the fact that German sappers detonated 8 tonnes of TNT explosive charges in each of the bunkers upon leaving the place, it was not enough to destroy them fully! There is also a very interesting exhibition about Hitler's assasination attempt carried out by von Stauffenberg.
You can find more about Wolfsschanze here -> https://wolfsschanze.pl/en/
From there we went to Mamerki - or Mauerwald - the headquarters of German Land Forces (OKH) located close to lake Mamry. Another set of huge bunkers, with some connected with underground tunnels.
There is an interesting exhibition on Wunderwaffe, Amber Chamber, Stalingrad and other.
More on Mamerki here -> https://www.mamerki.com/index9ed2.html?lang=en
The next stop were the canal locks near Leśniewo. I must say this was really interesting!
Hitler had this idea to connect the Baltic Sea with Lake Mamry with a set of canals (that's up to 150km of canals!) to allow U-boats to hide in deep lakes. They started to build the canals and sets of sluices/locks to allow the ships to travel deep into the land. They are massive!
The last stop was Hochwald (Schwartzschanze) - near Pozezdrze - HQ of SS and main bunker of Heinrich Himmler. It is said that Himmler did't spend much time in it as he prefered to live in his train Heinrich (or Transport No. 44) on the local station. Another grim and spooky place.
There is some information here, but requires google translation -> https://atrakcje.mazury.pl/kwatera-himmlera-hochwald/
On the way back to Warsaw we took a detour and visited the Masovian castle in Ciechanów.
To have something hobby related, when I got home, I found the new Paraguayan War ruleset in my mail box. I might do couple of units one day ;-)
Some photos below:
Wofschance - Wolf's Lair - Hitlers HQ
Best wishes,
Jan
An interesting looking place Jan…
OdpowiedzUsuńIt’s fascinating how nature is slowly reclaiming everything…
All the best. Aly
Indeed Aly! It was originally hidden deep in the forest and hard to see from air as there were wire nets spread on the trees and covered with different colours depending on the season (you can see the wires still sticking out of the tree on one of the photos), as well as the bunkers were covered with seeweed mixed with concrete (also on some pictures), but now with al the errosion and plant growth everything is sucked more into the nature. Truly fascinating.
UsuńBest wishes,
Jan