Trespassing Into History

Dynamite was invented in Geesthacht, and for a long time the town was regarded as Germany's "powder magazine". In this powder factory located in the sand mountains east of Hamburg, powder raw material from the nearby dynamite factory was processed into powder types and ballistically tested from 1935 to the beginning of April 1945. During the Second World War, as in the dynamite factory, foreign volunteers and forced laborers were used in addition to the German workforce.

In July 1871, Kaiser Wilhelm I donated the "Besenhorster Sandberge", a 20-hectare hilly dune site, to Otto von Bismarck. The industrialist Max Duttenhofer built...(more)

This abandoned shooting range with its brick bullet trap was built in a boggy area at the time of the German Empire at the end of the 19th century. During the Second World War, the shooting range was extended with a concrete wall.

There is not much information about this place, which is now privately owned. What is certain is that the facility was used not only as a shooting range, but also as an execution site, where forced laborers, deserters and other delinquents were executed. Often the bodies of the victims were not even taken away, but simply...(more)

In August 2019, we visited an object that we had long had on our list, but never had the opportunity to visit until this point. It is an old manor whose history goes back a long way. The villa, to which the title "manor" has passed, was built in the late 19th century.

Initially used as an industrialist's villa, over time the building underwent many new uses - as a planned mothers' recreation home, as a Reich Labor Service camp, as a Red Army military hospital, as a school for judges, as a school for the FDJ travel agency, and as a pioneer leadership school.

After a fire devastated the attic in the summer of 2018 and the firefighting efforts caused further damage, we knew that the days of this beautiful building were....(more)