– Day 23

            We slept in a little longer this morning, then had a nice breakfast and headed for the train station to go back into Nürnberg.  We started with the Nazi’s.  Literally.  Nürnberg was considered the headquarters of the Nazi party and the Third Reich.  Hitler wanted it this way because he thought it would build on the fact that the city was the headquarters for centuries for the First Reich – the Holy Roman Empire.

            We took the train to the southeast part of town, where the Nazi’s had huge plans to build a party center for their big rallies.  They didn’t finish all the building they wanted to do, but we did see the Zepplin Park where the large rallies were held.  If you’ve ever seen movies of Hitler addressing hundreds of thousands of people at one time, it was at Zepplin Park.  Some of the buildings have started to fall down, but you can still recognize it.  It’s very eerie to stand on the platform where Hitler addressed all those people!  We also saw the Grosse Strasse, a road as wide as a football field and about 1 ½ miles long.  This is where the German troops would march in lockstep formation to portray the glory and power of the Third Reich.  You may have seen pictures of these parades also.

            Then we went to the Document Center, which is really a historical exhibition with pictures and movies about the Nazi part, its origins and goals, and ends with the Nürnberg war crimes trials.  We spent several hours going through this.  It’s very sobering. You realize what a genius and madman Hitler was.

            We then caught a bus back into town and toured the Albrecht Dürer house and museum.  Very well done except that there are no original works in the whole place.  But there were nice displays of the work of some of his contemporaries, and part of the house is set up to show the lifestyle of the early 1500’s  Very enjoyable and educational

            We were pretty tired, but we had an hour left, so we went to the Germanicus Museum.  This is really huge, and could take a day or more to go through.  We had less than an hour, and Dea and Barb wanted to just sit.  So Paul and I went in and discovered that admission was free for the last hour.  We headed immediately for the musical instrument room – literally hundreds of harpsichords, pianos, organs, and other instruments.  That’s all we got to see, but it was worth it.

            Took the train back to Feucht, and we took Egon and Christa out for supper, then finished in the sunroom again.

            Tomorrow we leave here and head for Munich.  I think we’re going to stop at Augsburg – it’s on the way – even though we’ve been there before .  It’s a very interesting  place.  Only one week until we head home – time does go fast.