Well today went a lot better than yesterday. The bus line was in full service and made it to the place is I more or less (mostly less) mentioned yesterday, and that is the Konzentrations Lager Neue Bremm, in South West Saarbrücken, right at the border with France. It’s a concentration camp, (Lager is camp/emplacement/installation etc…) though different than most of the others. This one wasn’t so much to just store large amounts of prisoners, this one is actually small, not much bigger than a basketball court maybe. The purpose of this camp, run by the Gestapo (Secret Police) was purely a torture camp to break the most resistant prisoners. (One such punishment being forced into a crouching position and then having to jump for hours up to 6-8 hours). As a camp for men and women, nearly 20,000 very unlucky people passed through its gates. It is unknown how many died in the camp, but a posted sign said at least about 87, which seems very, very low. Nothing remains save for a wall with timeline, and some old foundations along with an old pool in the middle. All the signs were in German, with French subtitles. No English.

I then got to live out another one of my lifelong dreams I’ve had for the last 3 years. Next I took the regular train a ways west outside of Saarbrücken to the city of Völklingen. And there I did it. I broke into the Völklinger Hütte – an absolutely massive and abandoned Ironworks plant and wandered all over, past all the warning and caution signs, seeing all kinds of areas, from the blasting furnace to the… okay, well, I didn’t really break in, replace that with bought a ticket for it. But really though, it’s a huge Ironworks plant where they made big steel girders. Tons of the old structure remains, originally built in 1873, it failed after just a few years. In 1883 another man came in and bought the plant and brought it great success. The signage was really bad at explaining things, and it was nearly impossible to find your way do to a lack of signs which was irritating as the place was sooooooooo huuugggeeeee. There are about seven main areas. The  But it was still really, really effing cool to walk around, especially going up on the observation platform above the blast furnace. It had:

1. The Sintering Plant – “Sintering is the process of compacting and forming a solid mass of material by heat or pressure without melting it to the point of liquefaction. Sintering happens naturally in mineral deposits or as a manufacturing process used with metals, ceramics, plastics, and other materials.”
2. The Ore Shed – Basically just a massive storage area for all the incoming raw ore.
3. The Burden Shed – Another storage place for raw materials.
4. The Blast Furnaces – “A blast furnace is a type of metallurgical furnace used for smelting to produce industrial metals, generally pig iron, but also others such as lead or copper. Blast refers to the combustion air being “forced” or supplied above atmospheric pressure.”
5. The Paradise – A big section of the plant that’s been heavily overgrown with plant and wildlife. Used to be The Coking Plant. (“Coke is a fuel with a high carbon content and few impurities, made by heating coal in the absence of air. It is the solid carbonaceous material derived from destructive distillation of low-ash, low-sulphur bituminous coal. Cokes made from coal are grey, hard, and porous. While coke can be formed naturally, the commonly used form is synthetic. The form known as petroleum coke, or pet coke, is derived from oil refinery coker units or other cracking processes”)
6. 6. Ferrodrom and Coaltrack. The Ferrodrom is a science center explaining iron and steel with a bunch of exhibits. (I did not do this as I didn’t even notice and completely forgot, as there’s so few signs around pointing anything out. The coal track is a series of tracks that carry big tankers to dump coal into the blast furnaces high up.
7. The Blower Hall – Where massive generators built up air pressure for the blast furnaces.

All in all, it was waayyy cooler than I thought it would be! And I haven’t yet mentioned, the Blower Hall is also serving as a gallery exhibit for British Queen Elizabeth! It’s loaded with tons and tons and tons of photos and some coins, and tons and tons of porcelain cups and plates made from different time periods in her life honoring her. It walks you along a timeline of her simply astounding life, showing photos of her at all ages, at all kinds of activities and in different places around the world. I’ll let the pictures explain the rest! I really won’t be able to explain what many of the pictures are, you’ll just have to look and see. But this Ironworks Plant easily jumps up to one of my top five favorite things I’ve ever done in Germany. The plant had shut down in the 1980’s after 100 years of operation.

I also then made it to my next stop Freiburg im Breisgau. Or just Freiburg for short.

Also this again… yay… German city with a goofy name! Today’s winner is: Dinkelsbühl!

A former prisoner who revisited the camp in the early 2000’s demonstrating the crouch-jump torture.

A couple videos:

On top of the observation platform: