B2b euro tour the wolfs lair and hitlers garden

Transcript

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Hello everyone and welcome to the Beat Battlefield Eurodoor. We're currently on day two, and what I've done is I've taken a month off work and decided to travel around some of the sites I've always wanted to do as part of my military bucket list. If you've got any items on your military bucket list, please send us a message. You can do this via the comments below. But today I'm out in the far east of Poland, where once upon a time the borders had been split. Some parts would be handed to the Russians in the German invasion of 1940, and of course the Germans would push on in February to try and take the rest of Poland and move on to the rest of the Soviet Union. I'm going to go and visit the Wolf's lair. Here, from the end of 1940 up until the end of 1944, this would be the main command centre where Adolf Hitler spent at least 800 days, one of the probably the most visited sites for him during the entirety of the Second World War. Now, when I started doing these podcasts, I want to be able to give you options as part of your travel. Over the years, and I've been a tour guide now for nearly 20 odd years, and sometimes it's nice to be a tourist, but sometimes it's great to do stuff under your own steam, as you can see so much more. But if you're a bit limited on time, from the cities of Gdanz, Krakow and Warsaw, you can book a tour to go to the Wolf's Lair. However, it's going to be about a four-hour journey each way, and from what I've seen of the tours that are going there, it's very much rushed around the site. There are two or three museums on the site, and the group, which was made up of fairly middle-aged people, weren't getting enough time to go into the museum. So I imagine it's a case of driving out there, stopping off, and then driving back four hours. So what I did is I flew into Gdansk, which we've done the last three podcasts on, and then I got the train from Gdansk out to Katzin. It's about a three-hour train journey. And from Katsarin, there are many taxi services that will take you from Katzin to Wolfslayer. You will need to arrange a time for them to come and pick you up. Although, if you want to give them a call, you can do. I decided not to do this, as part of this European tour is trying to push myself as I've recently damaged my leg and I'm trying to get the trying to get the movement back into it and trying to build up my muscle. So today I've done about a 20 kilometre around walk, and yeah, it's worth it. I'm currently laid in my room and my apartment. And if anyone who's visited, thinking about going further afield in Poland, you can get wonderful apartments for just over £20 per night, and that's what I've done. I'm staying here for two nights. I'm gonna leave tomorrow morning and I'm gonna make my way to Warsaw, but I digress. Now, today was part of the bucket list going to the Wolf Slayer, a site which's been mentioned so many times over the years, and visiting the site of where the July bomb plot nearly succeeded an end of the war by a year. When you arrive at the site, it'll cost you about 30 slotties, which is about six pounds to get into the museum. There is also a campsite there, so if any of you are with camper van, you can park up there. And inside the former barrack hut of one of the low close guards of Hitler, there is a cafe and there's also a hotel on site, but you can bring a camper van there. There's what I've seen is there's good toilets and showers. So if there's anyone out there who's doing biking tours, it might be a place you want to stop off at. And the calf is very well decked out, and it's great to stop for a coffee on your tour. For an extra ten slotties, you can get yourself an audio guide, and I'd highly recommend getting this if you're going under your own steam. Although the site is completely surrounded with information panels, it adds a little bit of extra history, and those tiny little nuggets of history that you pick up as you go around. You walk up past the cafe and past the restaurant, and now we're stood on the site where the July bomb pot, where Colonel von Schlappenberg would leave a briefcase next to a note table on the 20th of July 1944, designed to assassinate Hitler. However, sadly, someone moved the briefcase to the wrong side. Three of them would die, and Hitler's trousers would be completely ripped to pieces, but he'd kill still carry on living for another ten months. And sadly, von Stauffenberg and all the associates who involved in Operation Valkyrie would be executed within two days of them being of the actual plot itself happening. It's then a case of walking around the main site, and there is a memorial to remember the Polish engineers who had to clear the mines out of the local area. In fact, when the bomb plot went off and they were driving away in the cars, they told the drivers who were not aware to drive into the train station that it was probably an animal stepped on the minefield, and there were 20,000 mines located around this site. The reason the site was built in such an area was its closeness to the cutoff zone, the demarcation zone between the Soviet Union and Germany when they were both allied. It's also built into a swamp and a very dense forest. So to attack it would be a hard, hard graft for the uh for the Russians. And of course, there was plans for the engineers to blow the thing to Kingdom Come, which they did in November 1944 in case of invasion. It also has an amazing train route, sadly not running today, but here Hitler's America train would ride into the station, and also all the other local uh German allies, such as Mussolini and the others from Romania and Hungary would also come through here in their time. The site has several bunkers dedicated to people such as Martin Bormann and Hermann Goering. The site was blown up by the Germans in November 1944, but these are such huge structures that it would take a lot more than the eight tons that was posted in each of them to blow the kingdom come. However, some of the roofs have come off and fallen off, but generally around the site you can get a good idea of the scale of some of these buildings. There is then a reproduction room of the centre of that conference room where on the 20th of July 1944 Von Staffenboat tried to blow up Hitler, and it is an interesting tale to see. It's a very busy site. So just seriously to show that even though this is in the middle of nowhere, it's one of those sites that people want to come and visit. There's also a special museum dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising. But I will talk more about the uprising when I'm in Warsaw in the next couple of days. But here, within the actual Wolfsclair, the plot for what to happen, what was to happen to the people of Warsaw was planned and plotted out here. Then you'll come to the end of the museum where you can go exit all good museums, you can exit via the gift shop, you can get a Wolfslayer towel, hat, and even a cuddly toy if you really want to. So the actual visit to the site it was roughly about two and a half hours, and that is with a decent wandering around, reading everything, as well as stopping for coffee and a pancake. Now, in the local area, within the woods outside, you can still see some of those German pillboxes and bunkers, which, if you just go off the trail, you can have a little wander around. And I will give my health and safety briefing here. These are 80-year-old buildings that were trying to be blown up, so please be careful. Don't go too deep into them, otherwise, you will go deep down into them. And if you're anything like me, I don't tell anyone, anyone anywhere where I am on these tours. So one day you won't probably hear from me again. If you don't if you don't hear a podcast from me from two or two or three days, please tell someone that I'm probably stuck in a hole somewhere in Eastern Europe. Now, when I looked at the Traces of War app, I actually found a World War I Russian cemetery, which I had to go and visit. This is my first time on the Eastern Front battlefields. So I followed the map and then I found something which became a little side quest, but I had to make sure I got to the Russian cemetery. But when I typed in cemeteries in local area, I actually found a hidden First World War German cemetery hidden in the woods. Behind one of the bunkers, which was part of the airfield, there are about five or six graves in the wood to German soldiers who died during the First World War. All the graves are battered and bruised, and you can't make out many of the names, just some little dates. But to this day, the locals still come and lay candles for the soldiers who died. And then we walk up the road and come to the German, this the Russian cemetery. Here there'll be a battle in 1914 over one of the fortresses here in Prussia. And there are eight graves made of wood, and they are still maintained to this day. However, perhaps depending on what happened to the Russian war, maybe they will be destroyed. But I'll get back to my side quest. Now, when you travel around Poland, they do have lots of different attractions, and as you drive along and walk along the roads, you'll see them from miles away. But here there was a little soft play park. Now you could go and visit a model village of Poland, you could also go on a bouncy castle, and you could also visit Hitler's Garden. This had me really intrigued, and there was also a military museum on site, so I thought I'd go and give it a go. For the pricey sum of six euros, I wandered into this site where there was loads of different unicorns, giant lobsters, garden gnomes, and it looked quite intense. There was also a mention of Wojciech, who was a bear. They found it the Polish army found it in Siberia, and during the Battle of Monte Cassino, he would carry ammunition to the lines. But let's get back to Hitler's garden. This is one of the most forgotten relics of the Second World War. Hitler's Garden. And now there's me thinking it was some sort of pro-Nazi, someone's created like a memorial garden to Hitler. However, it's actually the garden where his vegetables were built, were made. Hitler was one of the worst vegetarians in history, and of course, he had to be fed carrots all the time. He was very famous for having terrible flattuents, as he would often eat lots of lentil soup. And on this side here, amongst the machine machine guns and anti-tank guns and a couple of um motorbike and sidecars, we can go back into the footprint of the former walled garden. In this garden, there was a lotments which made many of the vegetables, which we've given to Hitler's chief cook, where they would produce those vegetables. So I will be doing some TikToks about that, and I will try and do some quite hilarious ones because I think that's something that people will be quite interested in. I will bring you on to TikTok very shortly. The reason I'm doing this month away, and I'd be able to afford not to go to work for a month. I am currently on unpaid leave. So if anyone will come buy me a coffee or anything like that, that'd be absolutely amazing. But through TikTok, I've made quite a lot of money. And though for the first world war is my absolute passion, I sadly make a lot of money off Holocaust videos. And my my actual plan is when you have a large number of Holocaust deniers and pro-Palestinians shouting things at you all the time, just for them doing that, that earns me even more money, which pays for me to go to these Holocaust sites and make more videos. Um, later on on the tour, I will be going to Matthausen and Trublinka. But um wandering around this little play park where there was a bounty castle and some soft play, there's also a medieval fortress and a miniature village. There is a very small military museum which has very much the same things you'll see in the local area. So we've gone from the Wolflet Wolfslayer and Hitler's allotment, as well as a fur a couple of First World War cemeteries. So, guys, give us a follow, quick listening to the videos, and day by day I'll be doing these podcasts. I am going to put a bit of a gap in between them because otherwise I'll completely sell out on all the all the orders, and hopefully, you guys are listening. But if you've got any questions or any suggestions on your military bucket lists, put them through in the comments. So thank you and good night.