Nuremberg is the second-biggest city in Bavaria after Munich, and there’s lots of reasons to love it. Like so many German cities, the architecture is gorgeous. There’s a big fortress on the hill where you can walk up and watch the sun set over the red rooftops of the old town.
It’s the spiritual home of lebkuchen, and that, in my opinion, would be reason enough on its own to go there and never leave. The city also boasts Germany’s most celebrated Christmas market, and is reputed to have the best sausages in the land. Gingerbread, glühwein, bratwurst – what’s not to like?
But the city of Nuremberg has a dark past. If you played the word association game with people outside Germany, I’m guessing the first thing the name “Nuremberg” would conjure up would be the infamous Nuremberg rallies.
Bavaria was the spiritual home of the Nazi movement, and Nuremberg was praised to the skies as “the most German city in Germany”. The city received its ultimate “compliment” when it was chosen as the venue for the Nazi Party rallies in the 20’s and 30’s – giant gatherings of the party faithful, replete with fearsome military displays, kooky pseudo-religious rituals, and of course, fervent adoration of the infallible Führer.
The huge parade ground of Zeppelinfeld (Zeppelin Field) was specially built on the outskirts of Nuremberg by Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, to host these party rallies. Special railway stations were constructed to deal with the influx of thousands of enthusiastic visitors, and giant tent cities would sprout up on each occasion to accommodate them.
When the Nazis were finally defeated in 1945, Germany was split into four parts, each ruled by one of the major Allied powers (America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union). Bavaria came under US military control, and one of the most iconic images of that decade is the footage of the American forces blowing up the giant swastika towering over the Zeppelinfeld.
(From Wikimedia Commons)
After the war, the Allies began an intense campaign of “denazification” to destroy Nazism as comprehensively in an ideological sense as it already had been militarily. An Allied unit called the Psychological Warfare Division was set up to instill a sense of “collective guilt” among the German people – that the atrocities of the period were the fault of the entire nation, not just the Nazi elite. Graphic films of the concentration camps were screened across the country, and ordinary Germans were conscripted to exhume mass graves and rebury the corpses of the victims.
Then there was the question of what to do with the prominent party buildings commissioned by Hitler. Should they be ignominiously destroyed and forgotten, as Hitler’s body was by Soviet troops after his suicide in Berlin? Or should they be preserved as a reminder never to allow history to repeat itself? You could plausibly argue for both sides.
In the case of Nuremberg, it was decided to go with the latter option, and I think they’ve done a good job. You can still walk on the Zeppelinfeld today, and it’s interesting to see what the government has done with it. Instead of destroying it completely, they’ve selectively taken down some of the more imposing parts of the structure (the big swastika for example, and some of the towers around the grandstand). The bleachers have been abandoned to nature and are overgrown with thick weeds. The Nazi pretensions to grandeur have been belittled by turning over what remains to much more mundane uses. The main marching area has been converted to football fields (and is occasionally a venue for large concerts). Can you imagine having to play your weekly soccer game here?! It would be surreal.
If you stand on the balcony from where Hitler used to speak, you look out over a truck parking lot, separated from the football fields by a four-lane stretch of road where a group of petrolheads were doing wheelies in the snow when I came here a second time. It’s a deservedly ignominious fate for a soapbox that spawned so much cruelty and suffering. Well played, Nuremberg.
Right next door to the Zeppelinfeld, the half-finished Kongresshalle (Congress Hall) also remains intact. It’s the largest Nazi-era building still standing. But it’s been converted into the Dokumentationszentrum (Documentation Centre), a museum chronicling the rise, rule and fall of the Nazi party. The exhibition is absolutely outstanding. You come to understand how Hitler managed to bring an entire nation of ordinary people unquestioningly in line with his extremist agenda. This is certainly something you cannot miss when visiting Nuremburg.
A few weeks before I went to Nuremberg, I visited Dachau, the first concentration camp built by the Nazis (it’s just outside Munich). It wasn’t exactly a fun day, but it was educational. My experience in Berlin was the same. All throughout Germany, the horrors of the Nazi era have been unflinchingly documented.
Not to excuse what happened, obviously, but you have to give this country a ton of credit for being brutally honest about its past and trying to understand how it was allowed to happen. You don’t see the same mea culpas from many countries who still chastise Germany about the Nazi period, yet have had equally shameful periods in their own past, and way longer to come to terms with them. I don’t see a slavery museum on the Mall in Washington DC, for instance. And Australia still celebrates its national day on the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet, dispossessing the original inhabitants of their land and beginning two centuries of their decimation and misery.
There was a neat ending to the Nazi period for Nuremberg, though. During the denazification period, the city became the scene of what are now known as the Nuremberg trials, in which the big wigs of the Nazi party who still remained alive were tried for their war crimes. Incredibly, many of them denied all knowledge of their own party’s policy of systematic genocide, even though they had signed with their own hands the orders that brought these horrific acts about. The Dokumentationszentrum has video footage from these trials, and it’s pretty gobsmacking to watch these guys baldly lying about their involvement. What utter creeps.
It’s a shame that after two visits to Nuremberg, I just spent an entire entry talking about Nazis. It really is a beautiful city, I promise. I’ll have to go back there a third time and come back with a blog post that’s solely about lebkuchen and sausage…
