Colmar and the Black Forest

A barn in the Black Forest area

On our first day aboard the Viking Kvisir, we took a bus trip to the Black Forest in the morning and a tour of the Colmar World War II area in the afternoon. All  the Viking longships are named for Norse gods. Kvasir was born of saliva from Aesir and Vanir. He traveled around spreading knowledge until he was killed by the dwarfs Fjalar and Galar. They drained his blood and mixed it with honey to create the Mead of Poetry. This mead imbues the drinker with the gift of poetry, thus introducing poetry into the world. I’m not sure that this means our trip will be one of knowledge-seeking, but it does seem like a good plan since we will be entering new areas of Europe for both of us. On another note, Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware brews a Kvasir which they developed from evidence derived from a 3500 year old Danish birch bark drinking vessel found in a tomb of a leather-clad woman who was probably a priestess or dancer. The brew includes wheat, lingonberries, cranberries, myrica gale, yarrow, honey and birch syrup. This is something I will have to try.

An old church in the Forest

Our visit to the Black Forest did not include a walk in the forest, something I was looking forward to. Instead we had an hour-long bus ride to a village on the edge of the forest that consisted of two stores, a town hall, and a hotel restaurant where Marie Antoinette spent one night on her way to marry Louis the 16^th and eventually lose her head.

The hotel

Remembering Marie Antoinette

One of the stores is all about glass-blowing and exhibits some wonderful examples. The store includes a forge and also has a blower heating glass with a blowtorch before doing the actual blowing. The other store demonstrates the building of the famous Black Forest cake on the lower floor while the upper floor is devoted to cuckoo clocks. Cuckoo clocks may or may not have been invented here, but they have certainly come to be identified with the region. The front wall of this store is itself a giant cuckoo clock. Inside you can purchase clocks at almost any price from a few Euros to several thousand. The intricacy and beauty was enticing, but we limited ourselves to a simple Christmas tree ornament that doesn’t even keep time.

The entire wall is a cuckoo clock

Closeup of dancers whirling by

About 200 yards from the village is an old chapel that we also visited. It sits on the road (path) that used to extend from Austria to France which explains how Marie Antoinette happened to stop here. You can still walk parts of the path, but in this area the path has been replaced by the highway.

The chapel

The old road

A road marker

In the afternoon we chose the World War II tour to the town of Colmar instead of visiting Colmar’s famous Christmas market. Colmar is where Audie Murphy won the Medal of Honor at the age of 19. 

Murphy was the most decorated American soldier in WWII

 He single-handedly held off a German attack for an hour while calling in artillery shots on his own position. Then while wounded he led the counterattack that won the day for the Allies. After the war Murphy wrote a memoir titled To Hell and Back which was made into a movie where he played the title role. Our guide was a young Czech woman who was so passionate about the story and the role of the Americans in liberating Europe that she was close to tears as she recited a veteran’s poem.

Our young guide

The road where Murphy held off the Germans

 After visiting the battle site we traveled to a cemetery atop a nearby hill and then t a small but remarkable museum in another nearby town. The museum housed in a former wine cellar has only two rooms, but they are filled with artifacts from the actual battlefields and a dozen or so full size dioramas showing the soldiers from both armies in the field and in their camps. After seeing almost nothing in Italy related to either World War I or II, it was nice to see this monument to Murphy and the museum.

Nothing special here, but it is a Mustang in a small town in France

Nazi Forts in Norway

Unlike the Swedes, the Norwegians fought the Germans in World War II. It did not take long for the Germans to defeat Norway, but the Norwegians take great pride in the extent of the underground warfare that continued until the end of the war. We visited a museum dedicated to just that in the Oslo castle complex overlooking the harbor. Designed to force visitors to walk all the way though (like the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC), we were able to learn the story through photographs, newspaper clippings, and dioramas with sound effects. They include the story of Vidkun Quisling who cooperated with the Nazis and ruled the collaborationist government for them. His name has come into common usage to mean traitor.

Posters from the Nazi fort in Bud

Norway was perhaps the most heavily occupied nation in Europe with one soldier for every eight Norwegians. The Nazi force included at least 6000 SS officers. None of this prevented the Norwegians from mounting a resistance movement intent on destroying Nazi fortifications, their heavy water plant and helping captured Allied soldiers get to England.

The Germans built a string of forts along Norway’s coastline. Convinced that the Allied invasion would come through Norway, they  wanted to be ready. We saw two of these forts on our travels, the first was during a lunch stop at Bud. Lunch was a nice piece of salmon. The view from the fort location shows why the Nazis chose this location.

We took a tour of the site before lunch. Our tour guide was much too young to remember anything from the Cold War, let alone World War II. Nevertheless, he did know the story. During the tour we were able to see where the Nazis lived and worked. While not a glamorous outpost it was certainly better than being on one of the fighting fronts, especially better than the Eastern Front where soldiers had to fight both the Russians and the cold. 

 Most of the grunt work building the forts was done by slaves brought in from Eastern Europe. They were fed enough to survive, barely, and provided enough clothes to act as a covering, but not enough to protect from the cold.

Working Clothes

The second fort we saw was at Unstad in the Lofoten Islands. This is so far north one wonders what the Nazis were thinking. Even if the Allies invaded that far north it would have taken months of fierce fighting to get anywhere close to Germany. We did not enter this fort even though tours were available. By this time, we were more interested in other aspects of life on the Lofoten Islands today. Nevertheless, it is an interesting example of the lengths to which the Nazis went to protect the Norwegian Coast.

Unstad coastline

Fort Unstad