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Monschau and Vogelsang

— Enchantment and evil: a fairytale town and a Nazi training camp in Germany's Westwall.”

Occupying the lower flanks of a deep green valley, through which the Rur river flows frothy the colour of beer, old Monschau seems almost hidden away.

Barely a few kilometres from the Belgian border, this little town of timber frame houses embodies the very notion of traditional, upland Germany.

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Monschau and Vogelsang

This wild and wintry corner of Germany is home to icy clear rivers, thick woodland, quaint villages of timber frame houses and the odd Nazi training camp.

A cold wind pours sleet on the streets, forcing visitors into warm, bright pubs advertised by black letter signs. Inside these cosy salons, below walls covered by old newspaper cuttings, celebrity photos and an array of antlers, folks sit with pink faces nursing a cup of Glühwein.

The precarious position of some warped old houses over the Rur might well seem like a metaphor for Monschau’s relationship with touristic cliché.

For at the weekend, Monschau bustles with strolling, felt-hatted couples dressed in taupe and walking enormous dogs.

The yellow lights of shops illuminate displays of collectors’ toys, cold weather garments and local speciality foods.

Stay until Monday, though, and you would think yourself the only living entity in a silent, shut-away town. All doors are closed and every footstep echoes on the shiny cobbles. There’s even something vaguely sinister about the place, like the inevitable dark side of every Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.

Ordensburg Vogelsang

Climbing north from Monschau into the Eifel National Park, the countryside grows increasingly dramatic. Wild plateaux of bent over brown grasses tumble suddenly down thickly forested precipices into lakes and rivers far below.

On the edge of one such plateau, alike in austerity if not beauty, silently stands a forbidding complex of buildings incongruously named Vogelsang (“birdsong”). There is something vaguely familiar about the appearance and type of these long, low blocks, their dark grey-brown stone blending with the bleak landscape. All of a sudden a foreboding symbol on one wall makes clear Vogelsang’s origins: it is a large, strident stone eagle.

Between 1936 and 1939, Vogelsang was a training camp for the youth of Hitler’s Third Reich. The alumni of this windswept outpost would be the future propagators of the National Socialist ideal. The idea was to take each ‘junker’ and instill in him the rhetoric of race theory and physical discipline.

The outbreak of war postponed the junker programme at Vogelsang and as it turned out, indefinitely so. Used sporadically in the years that followed, the camp was bombed by Allied forces in 1944, presumably because it was considered of sufficient strategic importance in the German Westwall (or “Siegfried Line”), the defence perimeter of the Fatherland.

Nevertheless, these air raids did not do the intended damage and when the Americans finally arrived a year later, after a famously difficult campaign in the Hürtgenwald nearby, Vogelsang was still largely intact.

Vogelsang was thereafter controlled by NATO and the land on which it stood was under Belgian sovereignty until 2006, when the site was vacated and returned once more to the German state.

The camp today can be visited “as a reminder and warning to practise tolerance and humanity” though it seems plain so soon after taking receipt that its custodians are still very much thinking about what to do with it.