TheByte

Rob

Fantastic pictures Chris. Your town is so old ...and so German, it looks like a postcard. How wonderful that the people have not decided to pull the old buildings down and erect a Zaha Hadid library or Herzog & de Meuron theatre -- it is great to see an authentic period city like this



BTW, was your town damaged at all in WW2?

cawimmer430

Thanks!

There were some contraversial decisions on the local politicians part. They wanted for example to build a restaurant in the middle of the town square in the shape of a chair - colored red!



Mühldorf was a major rail connection center during World War II. From here trains could be diverted to Munich, Salzburg, Prague, Frankfurt, Nürnberg, Landshut etc. so the Allies bombed the Mühldorf rail station twice. Of course some bombs went astray and hit the Stadtplatz you see in the pictures causing damage to the churches and homes. The house I currently live in was virtually destroyed, with the exception of the cellar.

There was also an ongoing project in the Mühldorf Hart (forest) of building a secret and bomb-proof aircraft bunker to produce the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter. So the Allies had an interest in this area. Problem was they couldn't find the bunker (it was so well camaflouged). After the war the Americans used 120 tons of TNT to blow up this bunker. Parts of it are still standing. Here are pictures I took on Sunday when I was there with my sister.

The bunker was never fully completed. The only surviving arch is arch 7 out of a planned 12. The distance from the inner bunker roof to the ground was 32 meters (less now due to dirt and gravel). I know a lot about this structure because I translated the book from German to English for my town's historical society!







Collapsed arch # 5


On the roof of arch # 7




The roof was 3 meters thick and heavily reinforced with steel to make it bomb proof.



Notice how the trees in the middle are at a lower elevation than the trees in the far background? The trees in the middle all grew on the ruins of the collapsed arches 1-6. The trees on a higher elevation in the far background all grow on normal soil. It should give you an idea of how large this bunker was: and keep in mind that only arches 1-7 were completed (out of a planned 12).

cawimmer430

Some crappy night shots I took with a tripod.