Munich and the indelible horrors of war

(Munich) Munich is a very beautiful city, pleasant to walk around, clean and cosmopolitan, rich in about twenty museums and a multitude of places of interest to visit — in particular one of the largest urban parks in the world —, but it is also the cradle of Nazism and the irrepressible rise of Adolf Hitler, the worst tyrant in history. A memory that we learned to cultivate because we didn’t want it to repeat itself, and yet…

Jean-Philippe Decarie
The Press

For more than three months, Russia’s brutal and absurd military intervention in Ukraine has continued to sow horror and consternation. Especially since the civilized world was convinced that the planning of such destruction of human lives belonged to another age, to a history of the past that was believed to be sealed forever with the end of the Second World War and the annihilation, in 1945, of the III^e German Reich and Nazi barbarism.

The Russian invasion in Ukraine has therefore revived in some of the images that we no longer thought we would see again in Europe, bringing us back to the horror of the two great wars of the last century.

A visit to Munich, bastion of the German National Socialist Party of Adolf Hitler, plunges us relentlessly into the gloomy and surreal world of the Second World War.

If the German people tried to forget this episode of tyranny never equaled in human history, it was only from 1965 that we undertook, in Munich, to restore the history of the Nazi movement for good to remember what horror feeds on.

Dachau Camp

From Munich Central Station, a train takes us to Dachau, a small town located about twenty kilometers northwest of the capital of Bavaria. It was here that the Nazi Party established its first concentration camp, in a disused World War I former arms factory well outside the town.

Adolf Hitler’s party took power in January 1933 and the Dachau camp was inaugurated three months later, in April 1933, initially to accommodate political opponents, then systematically Jews, Roma, homosexuals and all the other “deviants”, and finally prisoners of all nationalities who found themselves at war against Germany.

During the train journey, one can only think of the 200,000 prisoners who probably had to make the same journey between 1933 and 1945, but under very different conditions and state of mind.

Before arriving at the perimeter of the camp, we see the residences of the SS officers who had their headquarters and their training camp just west of the Dachau prison, originally designed to hold 7,000 prisoners, but which will house at the height of the horror more than 60,000…

It takes five hours to take the guided tour of the Dachau camp, five hours of a journey through time and dread where we cross the gates of the highly fortified camp which welcome us with the famous maxim engraved in wrought iron : ” Work makes you free “.

It is here that the SS will carry out their most sordid experiments to test human capacities for torture, and it is here that the first gas chamber will be built to experiment with Zyklon B, which will be used on a large scale. scale in the extermination camps — notably that of Auschwitz, where up to 6,000 Jews were gassed a day.

The crematory ovens of the Dachau camp will burn tens of thousands of bodies of prisoners, just as the court of executions will dispose of thousands of prisoners summarily slaughtered for no other reason than unreason fomented by hatred and Aryan supremacism.

Everything is still in place, with a crushing reality, although memorials have been erected to recall the suffering of the Jews, Christians or Russians who had to go through this hell on earth. The barracks that housed the prisoners were razed after the war, but a few barracks have been reconstructed to clearly show the evolution of the horror.

Initially, the rooms in the barracks could accommodate 50 prisoners, then it was 100, then 200, and up to 250 prisoners per room who slept on top of each other.

At the end of this pilgrimage to the heart of human hell, we return to Munich, where we can take one of the many guided walking tours of the city which retrace the genesis of the advent of the German National Socialist Party and of Adolf Hitler’s crusade, which wanted to restore all its splendor to the German people.

We have to admit, we come out of such a journey shaken. Overwhelmed by such a deployment of hatred and violence as relentless as gratuitous. But, curiously, we come out of it increased by the conviction that such aberrations can no longer be repeated. A conviction, however, brutally undermined by the daily images that the Russian invasion of Ukraine sends back to us.

Thousands of drinkers

It is hard to escape the call of beer when staying in Munich, and that is why it would have been vain and even unproductive not to take advantage of a brief stay in the capital of Bavaria to go take a short tour of the main beer gardens and taverns, characteristic of this mecca of brewing culture. Don’t get me wrong, the plan wasn’t to kick one out in Munich, but to take a trip to some of its famous breweries.

A week before I learned that I would be reporting to Munich, the news broke: After two years of absence due to the coronavirus pandemic and the ban on mass demonstrations in Germany, the Oktoberfest was finally going to resume its activities and indeed take place this year, from September 17 to October 3.

A good reason, therefore, to take an interest in this particularity which makes Munich famous. The capital of Bavaria has also become the world capital of beer with this annual flagship event.

Oktoberfest is the biggest fairground in the world, and the festival attracts, year after year, more than 5 million visitors during the last two weeks of September, in a wasteland in the city center, dedicated to holding of this event which has been held there for more than 210 years. A third of the 5 million visitors are tourists from abroad, including many from the United States, Australia and Canada, places where beer is also very popular.

During my visit, in mid-May, there was no mention of Oktoberfest, and the public square where 14 giant tents are set up during the festivities – the largest of which can hold more than 10,000 people – was deserted, but beer is still flowing in Munich, and there are plenty of places and opportunities to drink.

Beer gardens and taverns

You can’t visit Munich without sitting down at least once at one of the beer gardens that dot the city. We are talking here about real open-air taverns where customers can bring their own food, on the condition that they consume the beer served by the establishment.

The decor is sober, it consists of mature trees and picnic tables as far as the eye can see that are beset by hordes of customers who sit there pell-mell to quickly start a conversation.

There are around a hundred beer gardens in Munich, varying in size but often able to accommodate several thousand people at a time.

One Thursday evening, which came to close the most beautiful day of spring, I found myself at the Hirschgarten, in the heart of Munich, the largest beer garden in the city, capable of receiving up to 8,000 customers at the same time.

I arrived there at the beginning of the evening, it was full, and the people of Munich had obviously decided to celebrate this first beautiful warm day of spring. Couldn’t order a half or a pint. Here, as in most beer gardens, it’s the 1 liter mug that imposes its law, and it’s a truck that picks up dead bodies throughout the evening.

Some sections of the Hirschgarten allow self-service to avoid having to wait for busy waiters or waitresses — all dressed in Bavarian costume — who can lug up to 10 1-litre mugs at a time. I counted more than 150 customers in the queue to have access to the self-service barrels, as what thirst is able to overcome all obstacles, even waiting.

More than 200 employees still work hard all evening to serve and feed the 8,000 enthusiastic and noisy customers who occupy this vast urban garden.

Speaking of gardens, when you stay in Munich, you absolutely have to go to the Englischer Garten, the English Garden, one of the largest urban parks in the world, even larger than Central Park in New York.

A veritable oasis of greenery and bodies of water fed by various branches of the Isar River (closer to a river, according to our Quebec standards), the Englischer Garten allows you to take a break after long days of circulating in the center- lively city of Munich.

The site is also home to two magnificent biergartens, that of the Chinese Tower, which can accommodate more than 7,000 thirsty people at its hundreds of picnic tables planted in a totally rural environment, and that of the even more bucolic Seehaus, which unfolds on the banks of a lake in the park around the very chic restaurant which also bears the name of Seehaus.

But you can’t decently take a trip to Munich without stopping at the Hofbräuhaus tavern, located in the heart of the city center. Founded in 1654, by the Hofbräu München brewery, which today sells its beers all over the world, the Hobräuhaus tavern is said to be one of the most famous in the world.

It is built on four floors and can receive up to 20,000 customers in a single day in its 20 differentiated rooms. When I stopped there, I opted for the interior courtyard, which can accommodate more than 400 guests and which has all the attributes of a beer garden, since it is furnished with trees and communal tables.

Despite the density of the crowd, it was much less noisy than the main room, which had more than 1500 customers, but there as here, the shortage of labor strikes and you have to be patient to to be able to hope for a menu and ultimately a 1 liter mug… well deserved when it finally arrives.