Category: Battlefield Tours

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The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial Site – Part Two

The abandonment of Soviet prisoners by Stalin and the subsequent re-establishment of the camp as a special Gulag.

The first Soviet prisoners arrived at Sachsenhausen in August 1941. By the end of the year, more than 11,000 of these living skeletons were being held in the camp in appalling conditions. Impossible work conditions, meagre rations and mass executions steadily reduced their numbers.

The most common method of execution was by shooting in the so-called ‘neck shot facility’ located close to the camp crematoria. Here, an estimated 10,000 Soviet prisoners were executed over a ten week period during late 1941. Total estimates of Soviet prisoners murdered in the camp between 1941-45 vary between 11,000 – 18,000.
None of this mattered to Stalin, whose attitude towards captured troops was underlined in his statement that, ‘There are no Soviet prisoners of war. The Soviet soldier fights on until death. If he chooses to become a prisoner, he is automatically excluded from the Russian community’. This attitude even extended to his own son, Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugshvili, following his capture during the Battle of Smolensk on 16 July 1941. Soon after, Stalin ensured that the wife of this ‘Traitor to the Motherland’ was not spared the state’s wrath. Yakov’s wife Julia was subsequently arrested, separated from her three year old daughter and imprisoned in the Gulag for two years.

Stalin and the Son he Abandoned to his Fate

Following the German disaster at Stalingrad in February 1943, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus was taken prisoner. Soon after, the Germans suggested a prisoner swap, their senior officer for Stalin’s son. Inevitably, Stalin turned the offer down, saying that, ‘I will not trade a Marshal for a Lieutenant’. On 14 April 1943, Yakov was shot and killed. Contemporary reports indicated that he was shot whilst approaching the camp’s prohibited ‘Neutral Zone’ which bordered the electric fence. More recent investigations point to him being killed for refusing to obey an order to return to his barracks. In March 1945, Stalin talked with Marshal Zhukov about his son, whom he believed was still alive and being kept as a hostage. His hard heart began to soften a little towards a son who had once been dismissed by him as ‘a mere cobbler’. When the death of Yakov was later confirmed, Stalin rehabilitated him posthumously in the knowledge that he had died honourably.

Brick Built Baracks in Soviet Special Camp

The liberation of Sachsenhausen on 22 April 1945 came too late for Stalin’s son. Neither did liberation bring comfort to thousands of Soviet prisoners who had effectively been abandoned by the state. For them, there was no hope of rehabilitation, just interrogation by Smersh (Soviet Military Counter Intelligence). Stalin’s assertion that there were no Soviet prisoners of war, just so-called ‘Traitors to the Motherland’ condemned them to imprisonment and hard labour in the Siberian Gulags. Some Russian  prisoners  were held in Sachsenhausen (renamed by the Soviet authorities in August 1945 as Special Camp No.7).

Soviet Prisoner at Sachsenhausen

The arbitrary enmity of the Soviet organs of repression resulted in the convictions (after interrogation and torture) of alleged Nazi collaborators and soldiers who had contracted venereal disease in Germany. By 1946, the camp held approximately 16,000 German and ex-Soviet citizens (including 2000 women prisoners). In 1948, the camp was redesignated as Special Camp no.1. That year, some 5000 German prisoners were granted an amnesty and freed. Another 5,500 German prisoners were freed in early 1950.  More German prisoners were freed shortly before the camp was shut down in the Spring of that year. The few remaining Russian prisoners were transferred to the Gulags on Soviet soil.
For those so-called ‘Traitors to the Motherland’ who somehow survived their harsh treatment and subsequent cold-shouldering by the state, their ordeal was not over. Their rehabilitation did not finally come until after the fall of Communism in 1989. We still tend to associate cruelty and barbarity almost exclusively with Nazism, yet Stalin’s state was also brutal and unforgiving. Learn more about Soviet Special Camp No.1/No.7 on Leger’s ‘The Holocaust Remembered‘ tour.

Read part one of David’s Sachsenhausen blog, here.

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Paul Reed: Dunkirk

A new Second World War film has just been released by well-known director Christopher Nolan. Best known for his Batman series of films, Nolan is British and it is quite remarkable that he has been able to bring what is uniquely a British story into a Hollywood movie.

It promises to bring one of the most amazing stories of WW2 to a new generation, and perhaps help popularise interest in the conflict in much the same way as Saving Private Ryan did in the 1990s with Normandy.

Paul Reed’s Grandfather, Alex Marketis, a Dunkirk Veteran

Growing up in the 1970s my own childhood was dominated by WW2: our toys related to the war, our comics were full of war stories and the few TV channels we had often showed classic films like John Mills’ Dunkirk on repeat. But more than that, my grandfather was there, as a Corporal in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
He had originally enlisted in 1918 and then served in the regular army, coming home to my grandmother in Colchester as a reservist in September 1938. A year later he was back in uniform and off to France for the Phoney War. During the Retreat to Dunkirk he got ill, and was evacuated off the Mole. This most likely saved his life, as most medics like him remained behind with the wounded who could not be moved and ended up as Prisoners of War.
When I first started guiding for Leger Holidays in the late 1990s I often had Dunkirk veterans on tours when we stayed in Tournai, as many had been billeted there. We often made special visits for them to the graves of mates, or up to the evacuation beaches to see where they had been taken off.
Vehicle Pier on Dunkirk Beaches 1940

Many years later I found myself back at Dunkirk not only on Leger tours but with TV crews for a series of Dunkirk related documentaries and most recently for Channel 4 with Dunkirk: The New Evidence.
The appeal of the Dunkirk story is that it is truly incredible: nearly 340,000 men were evacuated under the eyes of the enemy, under continuous shell fire and aerial bombardment. Naval ships were used, Merchant ships were used and also the ‘little ships’ – small private vessels mobilised to get the boys home.
Men queued on the beaches to get off, built piers out of lorries, or marched along the Dunkirk mole to board bigger vessels via a gang plank. It should have been a costly failure, but Operation Dynamo was typically British: it turned defeat into victory, and the combined effort of the Navy to get them away, and the RAF protecting them in the skies above, saved the British Army and the lives of so many of our French Allies.
Sunken Ships at Dunkirk 1940

The new Dunkirk movie promises to cast fresh light onto all these stories, using an incredible array of well-known actors. And what better way to understand further than by joining us on a Leger battlefield tour to Dunkirk.
Our Dunkirk Fortress Europe tour looks at the Battle of France that led to the evacuation as well as taking you along the evacuation beaches and seeing the Mole. We pay our respects to the dead at the Dunkirk Town Cemetery and see the excellent war museum, which has been renovated in time for the movie release.
The veterans have grown fewer but the amazing story they lived through continues to inspire us and the new film will show that real history is better than any fiction.

 

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10 Facts You Did Not Know About Dunkirk


Here are 10 facts you did not know about Dunkirk…
1. The BEF were a Mix of Regulars and Territorials
Most of those who were in the Army in WW2 were conscripts, but the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in 1939/40 was unusual in that it was largely a volunteer army. Regular soldiers were predominantly volunteers, and some had served for many years. A large proportion of the BEF were Territorial Army (TA) units and these were all volunteers: often referred to as ‘Saturday Night Soldiers’ as their role in the armed forces during peacetime was part-time. The size of the BEF in 1940 was estimated at over 300,000 men.
2. The Dunkirk Perimeter was Massive and Covered Two Countries
As the Allies pulled back across Northern France, a decision was made to defend the Dunkirk area to allow men to be evacuated. The defensive perimeter set up, largely along the lines of canals and waterways, which offered a natural barrier, extended more than 10 miles inland from the beaches and across 25 miles from Dunkirk town to Nieuport, in Belgium. The thousands of men defending these were therefore spread across both French and Belgian soil, in an area as big as the Ypres Salient battlefields of WW1.
3. It Was Not All About The Beaches
Of the 338,000 Allied soldiers evacuated at Dunkirk only a third of them were taken off the famous Dunkirk Beaches. While the popular myth remembers the beaches, most men were evacuated via the less glamorous ‘Mole’. This was a stone jetty that extended along the harbour mouth. The far end was wooden. The water either side of The Mole was deep so it meant that large vessels could come in, moor up and load very quickly. Ships were sunk here by bombs from German dive bombers, but it was a very effective method in getting the majority away. The Mole survived WW2 but was lost in a storm in the 1970s, although the stone sections remain.

4. Not All the Little Ships were Little
More than 700 private vessels were requisitioned as part of Operation Dynamo. Many people believe that they were all small boats but the fleet of so-called ‘Little Ships’ included some quite large vessels. For example, the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company provided 10 of its 16 ships, which included substantial steam powered ones like the Mona’s Queen which weighed in at over 2,700 tons. This company’s ships alone rescued more than 26,000 men from Dunkirk, giving an insight into the importance of their role. Many Little Ships were lost and the wrecks of some can be seen on the Dunkirk Beaches to this day.
5. Lorry Piers Were Used to Get Men to the Boats
For the men who were evacuated off the beaches there were problems in that very few could swim. How to get them through deep water and onto a ship? An idea was developed to line up Lorries across the beach at the low tide, side by side, and put planking over the top. This turned the line of Lorries into an improvised pier at high tide, enabling those unable to swim to walk over the Lorries and board a ship out to sea. Many of the more than 100,000 men taken off the beaches used this method.
6. The Indian Army Was at Dunkirk
Britain relied heavily on the Commonwealth in WW2 but few Commonwealth troops took part in the 1940 campaign. However, several Indian Mule Companies were in France at this time, being used to re-supply the British Army. These men were evacuated via Dunkirk, but en-route passed the old Indian Army memorial at Neuve-Chapelle, from the First World War. Several Indian soldiers were killed making the sacrifice at Dunkirk truly multi-national.
7. The RAF were in the Skies Above the Beaches
Many of the soldiers at Dunkirk believed that the RAF had been pulled back to Britain to defend the mainland, and they had been ‘abandoned’ to their fate at the hands of the Luftwaffe. Recent research has shown that RAF squadrons were very active over the Dunkirk Perimeter, giving vital cover to the men on the ground. They were also flying sorties inland to attack the German’s Lines of Communication and troop movements.
8. The Medics Could Not Leave
There were many thousands of wounded at Dunkirk, some from defending the perimeter, some wounded in the evacuation, and many brought in having been wounded earlier in the Battle of France. A significant number were evacuated out via The Mole, where they could be more easily taken aboard ships on stretchers. However, some were so badly wounded that they could not be moved at all and a large number of personnel from the Royal Army Medical Corps volunteered to stay behind to care for them. This meant they were subsequently taken prisoner; most were not released until 1945, so spent five years as a prisoner of the Germans.
9. Many French Stayed Behind
One of the wartime myths of Dunkirk in occupied France was that British soldiers refused to evacuate their French Allies. This was used by the Nazi backed Vichy Government to demonise Britain. The reality was that nearly 140,000 French, Belgian and Polish troops were evacuated in Operation Dynamo. In addition over 40,000 French soldiers stayed behind at Dunkirk to keep the perimeter intact to the very last moment that the final evacuation took place. Their sacrifice helped save the British Army and should never be forgotten.

10. We Are Not Sure How Many British Soldiers Died at Dunkirk
As the British Army Retreated in May 1940, operational War Diaries and military papers were lost and destroyed. In the confusion of the retreat many soldiers got separated from their units, and when the final reckoning of casualties was made the War Office stated that 2,972 officers and 66,008 men were killed, wounded or missing from 10th May 1940 until the last day of evacuation in June 1940. This equated to about 1 in 3 of the BEF. The problem was that it was not known when many of these men died, or how many had actually died at Dunkirk. The cemeteries there have over 1,000 burials from the Dunkirk period, but many graves show dates of death as 10th May 1940 to a date in mid-June.  So we will probably never know what the true cost of the ‘Miracle of Dunkirk’ was.
Find out more about the real Dunkirk and visit the beaches yourself alongside an expert guide on our Dunkirk and Fortress Europe tour.

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David McCormack: The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial Site – Part One

How a place of detention, torture and murder became the home of the largest state sponsored forgery operation in the history of economic warfare.

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was designed in early 1936 by SS Second-Lieutenant Bernhard Kuiper. The site was constructed in the shape of an isosceles triangle, with the apex at the rear of the camp and the two equal sides forming the camp boundary.

SS Architect Bernhard Kuiper

The base of the camp housed the gate house and administration building from which the whole camp could be observed. The wooden barracks were built on a semi-circle around the roll-call square. In 1937, Kuiper looked back on his work with pride, stating that Sachsenhausen was, ‘the most beautiful concentration camp in Germany’.
Andrzej Szczypiorski who survived the horrors of the camp disagreed. Years later, during a visit to the site of his detention and torture, he asked his fellow visitors, ‘do you remember our Sachsenhausen as an elegant camp?’.

Sachsenhausen gate house and administration building

The first prisoners incarcerated in the camp were those placed into ‘Protective Custody’ for either real or perceived offences against the state. By the end of 1936, the camp held 1,600 prisoners. Later, the camp held several other categories of prisoners including Jews, homosexuals, career criminals, asocial elements, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war and Allied commandos/agents.

Salomon Smolianoff

Prominent prisoners included Pastor Martin Niemoller, former Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, Georg Elser (responsible for planting the Burgerbraukeller bomb in November 1939), Herschel Grynzpan (responsible for assassinating German diplomat Ernst von Rath in Paris in November 1938), Yakov Dzhugshvilli (Stalin’s son) and three of the ‘Great Escapers’ Sydney Dowse, Johnnie Dodge and Jimmy James.
Apart from being a place of detention, torture and murder, Sachsenhausen became the home of Operation Bernhard, an audacious plot to destabilise the British economy by flooding it with fake currency. The operation was essentially a revival of Operation Andreas which ceased operations after it’s head SS Major Alfred Naujocks fell out of favour with the head of the Reich Security Services Reinhard Heydrich.
The new operation began in July 1942, and was headed by SS Major Bernhard Kruger who had arrested and subsequently incarcerated master forger Salomon Smolianoff in Mauthausen Concentration Camp three years earlier.
Operation Bernhard produced some 9,000,000 backdated notes in denominations of £5, £10, £20 and £50 to an estimated value of £134,000,000. For many years after the war, large numbers of fake notes remained in circulation, prompting the Bank of England to take drastic measures by withdrawing all notes larger than £5.

A recovered Operation Bernhard forged £5 note

A new £5 note was produced in 1957. Seven years later, the £10 was reintroduced. However, it was not until 1970 that the £20 note was reintroduced. Incredibly, it took until 1981 for the £50 to be finally reintroduced. Such was the legacy of Operation Bernhard. Learn more about this fascinating subject on our Holocaust themed tour ‘The Story of Anne Frank and Oscar Schindler‘.
The second part of the Sachsenhausen blog will focus on the murder of Soviet prisoners of war, the liberation of the camp and its subsequent establishment as a Soviet ‘Special Camp’.

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David McCormack – The Soviet Treptower Park Memorial: A monument to victory, or propaganda set in metal & stone?

In the autumn of 1946, the Soviet military administration in Berlin sponsored a competition to construct a memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park. The thirty-three entrants were given a design brief which stipulated that the finished monument should symbolise liberation from Fascism, rather than victory over Germany.

The winning entry came from a ‘creative collective’ consisting of the architect Yakov S. Beloposki, the sculptor Yevgeni W. Vuchetich, the painter Alexander A. Gorpenko and the engineer Sarra S. Valerias.
The construction of the memorial was carried out by German labourers, supervised by a unit of Soviet engineer officers. On 8 May 1949, the completed memorial was inaugurated in a solemn ceremony attended by high ranking Soviet officers and German Communist politicians.

The imposing statue of a heroic Soviet soldier cradling a young German girl in his arm formed the centrepiece of the memorial site. In some respects, it follows in the tradition of the ‘Hermann’ monument at Detmold and the ‘Battle of the Nations’ monument at Leipzig.
These German monuments symbolised the heroic struggles of the German peoples against the tyranny of occupying powers. In the same vein, the Soviet monument in Treptower Park portrayed the Red Army and it’s German Communist allies as heroic defenders against an alien Nazi regime.
It has long been assumed that the soldier represented in the statue was Guards Sergeant Nikolai Masalov of the 220th Guards Rifle Regiment. General Vasily Chuikov’s  Fall of Berlin, a chronicle of the advance of 8th Guards Army through Berlin (published in 1968) contained a gripping account of Masalov’s supposed feat of courage in rescuing a three year old German girl during the battle for the Potsdamer Bridge.
Whilst Chuikov’s account added substance to the Masalov story, not everyone remained convinced. In 2009, Pravda journalist Maksim Kondratyev argued that, ‘It cannot be ruled out that the architect simply created a perfect image of the Soviet soldier’. In my own view, the statue is a propaganda piece loosely based an Masalov. Indeed, rumours persist that the soldier who sat for Vuchetich was not Masalov, but Ivan Odartschenko, a Soviet soldier who happened to be blessed with film-star good looks.

As Vuchetich was Stalin’s favourite sculptor, the direct involvement of the Soviet dictator cannot be discounted. Stalin was determined to demonstrate that whilst the capitalist democracies expended their wealth to defeat Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union paid a much higher price in blood. Therefore, the memorial is a means of conveying the massive losses incurred by Soviet forces and civilians during the apocalyptic struggle between the two diametrically opposed regimes.
Moreover, the memorial symbolises the liberation of the German people from Nazism. With this in mind, could it be argued that Chuikov’s account of the incident on the Potsdamer Bridge is no more than a companion piece to the memorial? Could it be, that the young girl, gently and reassuringly held by the humble Soviet soldier featured in the main memorial was no more than a symbolic creation? On our fascinating Rise & Fall of the III Reich tour, we look into these questions, and much, much more.

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David McCormack: Playboy, businessman, saviour, spy: Oskar Schindler's lesser known career with German Military Intelligence 1936-40

Oskar Schindler’s name became known to millions following Liam Neeson’s brilliant 1993 on-screen performance as the larger-than-life character in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Whilst this beautifully crafted film captured Schindler’s shrewd opportunism and supreme confidence, it did not satisfactorily explain his conversion from casual war profiteer to selfless hero.

This is entirely understandable, given that the film was based on Thomas Keneally’s book Schindler’s Ark (1982), which only briefly touched upon some of his pre-Krakow activities. Those activities included his direct involvement in espionage and undercover operations carried out by German Military intelligence (Abwehr) between 1936 and 1940.

A still from the film ‘Schindler’s List’

Given the nature of Schindler’s clandestine activities, it is hardly surprising that he remains a controversial and shadowy figure. According to Schindler’s own account, he joined Abwehr III Breslau in December 1936 after meeting the organisation’s chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris at a party. The unit to which he was attached principally dealt with code-breaking and radio monitoring.
Following reorganisation, his unit was redesignated as Abwehr II Breslau, tasked with carrying out espionage/counter-espionage and sabotage/counter-sabotage operations. During the fateful summer of 1938 which culminated in the Munich Crisis, he worked to provide Abwehr combat and sabotage teams with reliable maps and information on Czech troop movements and defences.

Oskar Schindler (L), Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Head of Abwehr (R)

Schindler was a somewhat minor figure in Hitler’s plans to take over Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, his activities did not go unnoticed by the Czech authorities. He was arrested on charges of espionage on 18 July 1938, tried and subsequently imprisoned. However, he was  released early under the terms of the Munich Agreement.
Through much of August 1939, Schindler played a more significant role in Hitler’s planned invasion of Poland. Operating with Action Commando Unit VIII around the Sillein border region in Slovakia, Schindler smuggled arms and men across the border into Poland in preparation for clandestine combat operations. Later, he participated in operations to secure the strategically important rail tunnel and tracks which ran through the Jablunkov Pass.

The railway tunnel at the Jablunkov Pass

However, Hitler’s miscalculation regarding British and French guarantees to Poland led to the operation being hastily terminated as a result of his fear of provoking a general war.  On 31 August, the carefully staged Gleiwitz Incident provided Hitler with his justification for attacking Poland. Schindler may well have had a role in procuring Polish uniforms for this SS orchestrated ruse de geurre designed to create the impression of Polish aggression along the German border. However, the evidence for his involvement is largely based on testimony from his estranged wife Emilie. As such, it needs to be treated with caution.
Following the occupation of Krakow by German forces in September 1939, Schindler moved to the city in the hope of resuming his business career. However, in reality, he never left Abwehr, as in 1940 he was sent on a mission to investigate difficulties affecting the flow of intelligence information from Turkey. It is also quite possible that his purchase of the Emalia factory was subsidised by his Abwehr controllers, who wished to use it as a front for their continued intelligence activities.

Main building, entrance to Oscar Schindler’s factory in Krakow, Poland

Working with Abwehr brought Schindler into close contact with some of the more unpleasant organs of the Nazi state. Consequently, he developed a distrust of the SS Security Service and the Secret Police, whose activities he regarded as beyond the pale. This distrust would later develop as a distaste for all aspects of Hitler’s terror state and would form the basis of the actions which led to him becoming the saviour of 1,100 Jews, who would certainly have perished without his intervention.

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David McCormack : Who is Anne Frank?

This month marks the 72nd anniversary of the relief of Bergen-Belsen where more than 50,000 people perished through wilful neglect, including the young diarist, Anne Frank

Anne Frank’s posthumously published diary first appeared in print in 1947. Since then, it has become an international best seller, instantly recognisable to millions. Less recognisable, indeed largely unknown, is the posthumously published (1979) wartime diary of Etty Hillesum (An Interrupted Life), a young Dutch woman who was murdered in Auschwitz in November 1943.
Hillesum’s remarkable diary shares the same literary qualities as that of Anne Frank, which is hardly surprising as both aspired to be professional writers. Arguably, it is Anne Frank’s far more complex afterlife which has resulted in her much greater posthumous success and reinvention as a symbol of hope and forgiveness.

Mari Andriessen’s bronze statue of Anne Frank was conceived in 1975 and has stood on the Square of the Westerkerk since 1977

The reinvention of Anne Frank began with the publication of her diary in the United States in 1952. To make what Anne herself initially referred to as ‘the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl’ more attractive to a wider (non Jewish) audience, the diary underwent a process of Americanisation, bowdlerisation and sentimentalisation.
This process extended even further with the dramatisation of the Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway in 1955 and the release of the Hollywood film (adapted from the stage production) four years later. Whilst both the play and the film were critical successes, neither captured the true essence of who Anne Frank really was.
Neither Susan Strasberg on stage, nor Millie Perkins on screen came close to capturing the mercurial and precocious young woman whose words have fascinated and inspired so many. Instead of highlighting her particular qualities, the version of Anne Frank presented to the world was a universal figure, designed above all to appeal to American youth.

Auschwitz-Birkenau. Here, after a three day journey from Westerbork, Anne and the other seven inhabitants of the secret annex were selected for labour.

This distorted, reduced, infantilised and decontextualised figure was even furnished with a happy ending. In true Broadway and Hollywood style, the adaptations of her story conclude with those lines in her diary about believing that people were good at heart.
However, we know that in reality, there was no happy ending. As such, the decontextualising of her good-at-heart passage represents the literary equivalent of plucking a rose from a bed of thorns. The impact of that decontextualised passage has nonetheless been enormous, as from it, she has come to be recognised as a universal symbol of hope and forgiveness.
In recent years, the story of Anne Frank has been subject to literary interpretations, or re-imaginings, most notably Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer (1979) and Sharon Dogar’s Annexed (2010).

The symbolic grave marker for Anne Frank and her sister Margot at Bergen-Belsen

Whilst both are written with a degree of sensitivity, neither help us to understand the true story, that of a life of great promise cut tragically short in the most terrible of circumstances.
For me, as a guide, it is important to distinguish between the crafted image of Anne Frank and the real person. Therefore, on The Holocaust Remembered tour, we take in the locations which serve to inform us about her real life and the circumstances of her death.
In a sense, Anne Frank lives on through her diary. However, we know that she isn’t alive, as this ordinary, yet extraordinary young woman was buried in a mass grave in Bergen-Belsen in late February 1945. That is what makes her story so unbearable and yet so fascinating. Furthermore, it is what makes this tour such an emotional, yet rewarding experience.

Anne Frank and the other seven inhabitants of the secret annex were sent on the very last transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz in September 1944
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Paul Reed: Exploring the Secret Wehrmacht Bunker

Getting prepared for new battlefield experiences is all part of the work Battlefield Guides carry out in readiness for the tours we do for Leger Holidays.

When there are new tours we always go out on a Battlefield Recce to check the fine details and make sure it all runs smoothly for when we have the groups with us. It’s all part of the professionalism with which we all approach how we operate Leger Battlefield Tours.
I was recently in Germany on such a Battlefield Recce with fellow Battlefield Guides David McCormack and Bill McQuade for the new Peenemunde, Baltic Coast and Berlin tour, which has its first departures this summer. This promises to be an excellent tour looking at different aspects of Third Reich history from the ‘Strength through Joy’ site at Prora to the development of secret weapons at Peenemunde, which will include for the first time having access to the actual rocket test stands and launch sites.

Zossen-Wünsdorf

However, one of the highlights of this Recce was our visit to Zossen-Wünsdorf to the site of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht: the Headquarters of the German Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht wasn’t just the German Army: it was the overall governing body of the Army (Heer), Airforce (Luftwaffe) and Navy (Kriegsmarine). All of these had personnel at Zossen in a massive series of underground bunkers and tunnels.
While some wartime planning was done here, it was in essence the wartime communications hub of the Wehrmacht, a site once buzzing with the orders, commands and information relating to every key battle in the war from Poland to Stalingrad to the final battles.

Zossen-Wünsdorf

Zossen-Wünsdorf is a ‘book village’ where there are a large number of second-hand bookshops, and we started our tour there with the group that runs the bunker site. Our guide took us in through the main gate, dating from Cold War days, but which immediately put us into the heart of the above ground bunkers.
These all resemble houses as they were used to disguise the site as a residential area; in reality they were the way into the underground structures used by the various branches of the Wehrmacht. Some had been damaged in bombing but most had been blown by the Russians. They stand as decaying monuments to the failure of the Thousand Year Reich.

Cold War entrance door at Zossen-Wünsdorf

From here we went through the woods to the entrance of the main underground section. Initially we went through some Cold War period doors, which were amazing in their own right, and then into what was the entrance area during WW2.
It was very wide and when we questioned this, it was so that small vehicles such as Kubelwagens could drive in and enter the lift to take them to the lower levels. It was at this point we began to get an idea as to how big this site was!
From here we made our way through the tunnels, rooms and corridors. Because of occupation as a Soviet Airmobile Headquarters during the Cold War, the site is in very good condition and easy to access: it is fully lit and there are easily manageable stairs. No crawling through tunnels or roping down holes! Health and safety on these visits is something we do have to think about as Battlefield Guides!

Cold War remains at Zossen-Wünsdorf

As we made our way through the bunker site we got some sense of the importance of it and also the scale, and just how modern it was. Having an integrated internal messaging system, it had the WW2 equivalent of email whereby everyone in the complex could message others through a message pod system powered by compressed air! Anyone in the complex could speak to any headquarters on any battlefield.
As you walk the corridors you just wonder what it must have been like when the surrender at Stalingrad came through or when it was clear the fronts in both East and West were collapsing.

Message pod system at Zossen-Wünsdorf

Coming back outside from the Wehrmacht Bunker we realised we had been underground for well over an hour, seeing a site not normally open to the public because of the safety issues and which we know will fascinate those who travel with us on this new tour that focuses on many areas of WW2 history we have not been able to discuss in such depth before.

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Paul Reed, our Head Battlefield Guide, will publish regular blogs including personal stories, new tour updates and plenty of interesting and factual information about the Battlefields of Europe and beyond. Sign up below and receive email alerts keeping you up to date with Paul’s blogs.

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2017 Battlefield Anniversary Timeline – WWI

2017 marks the penultimate centenary year of the end of World War One, and whilst next year will bring a whole host of important anniversaries surrounding the end of the conflict, 2017 itself still has many prominent centenaries including the battle of Passchendaele and the battle of Arras.

We’ve put together a timeline of all WWI anniversaries coming up in 2017, take a look below to see the significant dates we’ll remember this year.

Take a look at our Battlefield tours covering WW1 heading out in 2017 on our website, www.visitbattlefields.co.uk or on our main website www.leger.co.uk/battlefields.

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Paul Reed: The Legacy of Passchendaele

This year marks the centenary of the Battle of Passchendaele, a name that will be forever synonymous with our knowledge and understanding of the First World War, but more than that it is part of our collective consciousness of the war. When we think of that conflict we imagine endless miles of water-filled shell craters, thick glutinous mud, and everything from men, mules, guns and tanks disappearing into this mud.

All of this happened at Passchendaele; at times the landscape was as dangerous to soldiers as was the enemy shooting at them. Arguably it was the worst battlefield on which British soldiers served between 1914 and 1918; both in terms of the physical conditions and also the terrible scale of the fighting.

Hell Fire Croner 1917

What made Passchendaele such a terrible battle? It is not widely known that the first day of the battle, 31st July 1917, was a success. Most objectives were taken, and the Germans pushed off the high ground at both Pilkem and Bellewaarde. But it was a costly day, too: more than 6,000 British soldiers died at Ypres that day, one of the worst in Flanders during four long years of war.
Success, but at a cost: but another factor came into play that first day: rain. It began to rain that evening and pretty much did not stop raining for a significant period of the rest of the battle. It was the wettest summer in living memory, with huge amounts of rainfall. That in combination with the unparalleled use of artillery by both sides, the shells just destroyed the Flanders landscape.
Trenches, buildings, and the drainage systems all pulverised by warfare on an industrial scale. The water had nowhere to run except into the holes in the ground occupied by soldiers, or into the lunar landscape of shell craters. The mud became glutinous, in places almost liquid; and everything from men to every man-made object disappeared into it.

Shell Smashed Landscape at Passchendaele

Attacks failed, and the bodies of the fallen could not be recovered; with the mud and shell-fire, all trace of them was lost and Passchendaele is a battlefield that has one of the highest levels of soldiers with no known grave, now commemorated on the Menin Gate or Tyne Cot Memorial.
A century later it is easy to think that the mud, and men disappearing forever are one of the many myths of the First World War. But I have witnessed both in my work with archaeologists in Flanders.
On a dig in 2012 I saw how liquid mud, even after minimal rainfall, could drag us down and how the effort of dealing with a mud-filled landscape was almost impossible at times; and we had modern clothing, tools and no-one shooting at us!

A Century Later, Archaeologists Still Bailing Out an Old Trench

Back in 2001 I saw how the work of The Diggers at Boesinghe demonstrated that Flanders is still one large cemetery; and every year since more and more soldier’s remains are found. It will be one of the almost permanent legacies of the Great War at Ypres, along with the Iron Harvest of shells which are still being found by farmers on the old battlefields.

Archaeologists Working in the Mud of Ypres

To understand more of what Passchendaele was and what it means to us a century later you can travel to Flanders with Leger Holidays on several different tours in 2017. Join us for the actual anniversary commemorations at Tyne Cot on 31st July, or take the They Called It Passchendaele tour which looks at both Messines and Passchendaele in some depth.
You can walk the Passchendaele battlefield on Walking Ypres, and see it from ground level in some detail, and in November we commemorate the end of the battle with a special Passchendaele themed Armistice tour.

The Iron Harvest

The war poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote, ‘I died in Hell… They Called it Passchendaele’. A century on we owe to the generation which marched to Flanders in 1917 to understand that Hell and never let it happen again; and that is perhaps the real legacy in an ever changing world.

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Paul Reed, our Head Battlefield Guide, will publish regular blogs including personal stories, new tour updates and plenty of interesting and factual information about the Battlefields of Europe and beyond. Sign up below and receive email alerts keeping you up to date with Paul’s blogs.

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