The Nazi Fairgrounds

This day was the more educational and interesting of the two. Not too much spectacular views, but a lot to take in.

We woke up and got out of the hostel at midday. We had talked about the Nazi Fairgrounds with the guys last night, so decided to head there and check it out. It was a few kilometers out of the city, so we decided to drive there.

We knew we had arrived because of the monolithic stadium before us. You can see a picture of it below. This stadium has a lot of history behind it. Hitler wanted to build a monument, so impressive that it would not be recognised in the year 2000, but thousands of years in the future like the Roman and Greek ruins. He wanted the world to know that Germany was a superpower above all others.


Attached to the side of this monolith was the "National Socialist Documentarium" (Nazi Museum). This place was very interesting. You pay 5 Euro and you get this thingy to carry around. There is very little to see, you walk around the place and look at a few photos, and watch a few movies. Every photo though has an audio commentary about it. We spent over 3 hours in here.

This history behind this was just spectacular, I would recommend anyone in Germany visit this place. It goes through the history of how Hitler rose to power by forcing his way in through peaceful and non-peaceful protests. There is also a lot of history on the importance of Nurnberg and the Nazi fairgrounds to rally the Germans and to orchestrate the entire event.
- How he wrote "Mein Kumf" while in prison, which is the book he founded German society on.
- How he made himself out to be more of a God than a man.
- It goes through the detailed steps on a time line, showing how the segregation of the Jews + Gypsies happened. The systems put in place to trace them easily.
- How he was allowed to take over Austria and Czech. Republic with the permission of France/England. But war broke out when he invaded Poland.
- Onto the methods of tracing and rounding up the "bad-blood" into concentration camps, then specially designed extermination camps.

During some parts of the museum I shed a tear or two just in shear sadness about how something so horrific could happen, and how the whole thing was planned from the start.

The whole impression I got from the museum is that Hitler was a man with exceptionally good manipulation and organisational skills. But was misplaced and used for inhumane means. A great man, but very evil.

After walking through the Documentarium, you walked onto a gangway leading into the inside of the Arena. Here you could see what Hitler had planned. It was supposed to have a ceiling, but production on the arena halted after the war.


We left the arena to go see the rest of the Nazi fairgrounds. The entire grounds are 11 square kilometres. And are the largest collection of National Socialist monuments still around today. We walked down Grosse Strasse (great street) and down to the Zeppelin field (where Hitler held the Nazi rallies, more than 400 000 people were on the field and up to 3 million at each rally!)


After that we walked back to the car and went to Room 600 of the court house where the 23 remaining leaders of the Nazi's were tried, most commonly referred to as the Nuremberg trials. They are very famous because it was the first time political leaders were tried for their crimes against peace and humanity, making them responsible for their actions. 11 were sentenced to death, 7 to major-life imprisonment, 4 were acquitted and one committed suicide before the trial began.

This day was a history lesson and a half... it was a good day, but I don't think the words "enjoyable" or "fun" are quite correct here. It was just a very interesting day.

After this we drove home and went to bed... we were all shattered.