Wewelsburg

Sorry I'm running a little behind on the posting so if you want pictures you're going to have to look on facebook.

Last Saturday I went to Wewelsburg castle. It's not super well-known, but it's actually Germany's only triangular castle (or so the brochure says). I mainly went because it's a castle and it's only a short bus ride away. I took the bus from the Paderborn train station to Wewelsburg, which was really only a fifteen or twenty minute ride though the website said thirty. It's in a tiny little village, very quaint. The castle is not hard to find (when I say village I mean it) but if you're having trouble look for the church. For 3 euros you can go in the castle/"historical museum" and the SS museum in the carriage house next door is free. Grand total for bus rides and museum entrance: 14 bucks. Not bad at all.

The castle museum is really neat. It's not just about the history of the castle itself, but also about the history of the  area. It's all in German, so I just sort of looked at stuff and got the gist of things. There were some cool old sculptures and portraits, some processional dolls from the middle ages, lots of old swords, and some stuff about the history of the city of Paderborn. Apparently at one point in the 1400s there was a terrible fire in the large tower of Wewelsburg. Also, apparently the area is known for wrought iron work, glass blowing, and wheat. And apparently the rhino is a symbol for the area because apparently at some point there were rhinos in the rhineland? I don't really know on this one, but there were some bones arranged to fit a picture of a rhino on a wall. I also got to see the dungeons and the interrogation room where the bishops held witch trials.

The SS museum is fairly depressing. This actually has some stuff in English so I understood quite a bit more. Himmler decided Wewelsburg was going to be a sort of West Point for SS leaders and was trying to use it to give the SS some sort of historical validity. Now for the record, this castle was built for the Paderborn bishops. It has never had any knights. The moat was never filled and has never had any military value. But Himmler came in and made a bunch of fake stuff, knights' armor, shields, swords, china sets, old-looking books, etc, with the swastika on them. I mean, the shear volume of stuff they had impressed me. The townspeople actually began to believe that the SS leaders were indeed descended from some ancient royal line. The Nazis effectively changed history. Apparently this museum is partly intended to wipe out some remaining beliefs in this myth. The nice thing about the SS museum though is you walk through the dry moat which they've fitted up as a garden to the large tower to see two of the rooms Himmler had started to renovate. They never got to finish and no one's even sure how they intended to use the rooms. The main floor has a bunch of columns and they think it might have become a meeting room. The "keller" or crypt below ground is just down right spooky. For a long time there were rumors that the nazis had made some kind of valhalla down there but it's just a domed ceiling with stone walls and floors. The whole place echoes like crazy (you can hear people breathing) and in the center there's an indent where they think the nazis had intended to put an eternal flame. I didn't spend a lot of time there.

It was definitely worth it. If you can read German, I think you could easily make this into a nice afternoon. If you're like me and you just look at the pictures, it's about 2 hours worth. I went back to Paderborn for lunch where I got some delicious fish and chips.