Hannover and Bergen-Belsen

We departed Dusseldorf in the dark yesterday (about 8:00am), and headed for Hannover. An uneventful trip to Hannover probably climaxed when we hit about 154kmh in the car.

Despite some early and initial rain, the clouds were all gone by the time we got to Hannover (or maybe we just “out-drove” them??). We stopped at the beautiful Baroque gardens of Herrenhausergarten. Even in the winter these gardens were pretty spectacular, with beautiful hedges (even if they were bare when we visited), and canals and paths that lead so far into the distance that you couldn't see the end.

We then drove a little further into the centre of town, and stopped in for lunch at a brewery. I enjoyed my very first Currywurst (sausage covered with curry sauce - but actually it just tasted like tomato ketchup...).

We were delighted to be able to see the Hannover (yes two "n" - that's the German spelling) Neues Rathaus (New Town Hall), as this is said to be one of the most impressive in Germany. It's pretty spectacular, and the inside of it has four enormous models of Hannover in the 17th century, Hannover prior to World War II, the bombed out remains of Hannover (which was devastated pretty spectacularly by Allied bombing), and Hannover today. Hannover is a very modern city, and having hosted Expo in 2000, has had a lot of recent investment and expenditure on public art and sculptures, which was one of the first things I noticed when we drove through the city. Anyway - here is us in front of the Neues Rathaus.

From Hannover, we drove to the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp Memorial, which was a pretty sobering experience for us all.

There is almost nothing of the original camp remaining (in terms of buildings that housed the POWs and camp inmates, of which Jews and Poles were the majority. The camp was originally operated by the Wermacht (Army), housing camptured Soviet POWs, before the SS took over, using it as a camp to house those prisoners who were too sick to work in camps like Auschwitz and Dachau. Bergen-Belsen is one of the more famous camps for three reasons - firstly, it was one of the first camps liberated by the British as they began to work their way into Germany towards Berlin, secondly - there was one of the few trials of guards of concentration camps conducted by a British Military court, and thirdly - and the reason that we visited, as it was the camp where Anne Frank died from typhoid fever. There is a small gravestone (it doesn't mark her actual place of rest - rather it is a memorial stone).

But the area of the camp I found most affecting was the Museum. It's well set out, with a clear and logical progression of events. This museum uses the stories of those inmates who survived their time in the camp as a way of informing visitors about what it was like before the war, the camp as an interment facility for Soviet POWs, then as a camp for prisoners too sick to work. I found the small section dedicated to Anne Frank quite moving, but the thing I took away from the Museum was the section about the war crimes trials. Having done a school assignment about war crimes, I was particualrly interested to know about how they trialled those who had committed the atrocities at Bergen-Belsen. A comment by one of the lawyers was "In every day life, we prosecute people for assault, for murder, for anything where one human being hurts another human being. In these camps, this was all that occurred. There was no humanity shown by the guards to the inmates, rather, they were treated cruelly beyond belief every single day of their life. No prosecution of those who did this to them can ever make up for the degradation they experienced. But we can work to keep alive the memory of those who died in the camps, so that they will not be forgotten, and so that this will never happen again."