Liberation Route Europe

I have never heard of this international project and it appears not to feature here.

The first mention being in this article, centred around Oosterbeek, near Arnhem:

Link: Oosterbeek echoes to the battle of Arnhem: my tour guide’s vivid war memories

The website is full of information: Homepage - LRE Foundation B2B

 

Bull up your walking boots (or polish your tyres!)

Publication invested in within the last couple of years. No great depth of detail per-se within but as a hard copy overarching guide to the project it's not too bad.

Always remember, never forget,

Jim.

 

I am a Liberation Route Europe Guide and have been working with them for several years, I do give the the occasional plug.
Will age ever weary the subject?
and this one
Commemorative plaque to be unveiled at Cassino
and
Visiting Gothic line (Florence to 'Leghorn')
and mentioned their 2018 conference in this thread
http://ww2talk.com/index.php?threads/sword-beach-concert-controversy.73791/#post-792152

 

The basic idea is great. However, with regard to the war time events I am researching (Plunder and Varsity) I noticed that the presentation on their website is poor and displays a certain ignorance of even basic historical facts. For some reason, they are making light of the Rhine Crossings in the north. Not surprisingly, I am not too happy about this. But I hope that there is a chance to improve the presentation of this particular chapter of WW2. My hometown Wesel has pledged to get involved in the LRE effort and will make a contribution by commemorating the visit of Churchill, Montgomery an Eisenhower at Büderich - from the balcony of a restaurant situated on the western bank of the Rhine they observed the activities of Allied troops on March 25th, 1945. The stone commemorating it has not been placed yet - but it should happen soon.




This is the restaurant "Wacht am Rhein" today:

 

Once the monument is finished, the stone will display a QR code that will enable visitors to access a sound installation telling of the event. My contribution - also accessible via a QR code - will be a short film. I had US Army Signal Corps footage edited and wrote the narration - unfortunately it is only available in German.


This is a still from the film:

 

Are you involved personally? Who is leading on this from Wesel?

 

Hi Sheldrake,
the Municipal Archives (Stadtarchiv Wesel) is tasked with planning and coordinating the effort. I occasionally work with them, in this case I contributed content (i.e. the film) and as an historian specializing in Plunder and Varsity was asked for advice regarding historical detail.
Here's their contact:
achiv@wesel.de

Best,
Alex

 

Is this project a continuation of the long standing Liberty Markers which were erected after the war from the Normandy beach landings? The region has many such markers along the liberation route heading east.

La voie de la Liberté Markers

Digressing. After personally visiting Wesel, there is a semi circle of what looks low level military buildings on the Rhine east bank when entering the town via the bridge. These buildings appear to have survived or been recovered from the RAF bombing and appear to have some historical value. Is there a background to these unique buildings?

I got the impression that Wesel was a concrete city as is Le Havre. Wesel was hit hard to enable the establishing of a east bank bridgehead.

Interesting to see the numerous hospitality places along the Rhein carrying the patriotic call Wacht am Rhein, as I recollect on the west bank.

The balcony of the Buderich Wacht am Rhein shows superficial damage.I wonder what happened to Joh Huttner, the proprietor, the place seems to have been in the family since the late 19th century. Looks to be a quality venue.

I have visited Fredrichsfeld, just across on the east bank from Buderich. My uncle was captured during the 2nd Battle of Ypres and imprisoned in the POW Camp at Fredrichsfeld.

Good luck to those involved in what is a worthwhile project.

 

Hello Harry Ree,
I can't say much more about Liberty Route Europe - it seems to have been initiated by the (Dutch? )tourism industry and is apparently supported by some public funds.

Interesting to hear about your visit to Friedrichsfeld - the Wesel Archives have some records and photos of the WW1 POW camp.

Wesel was a fortress town since the 16th century - it was massively fortified under Prussian rule from the 17th century onwards. What you saw were the remains of the citadel. Wesel came under French rule during the Napoleonic Wars.

The fortress structures were dismantled after WW1. Under the rulings of the Versailles treaty Wesel became part of the demilitarized zone along the Rhine. Until 1914 the city had been the garrison for two Prussian infantry regiments (No. 56 and 57) and two field artillery regiments. I published a book about the Prussian Infantry Regiment No 56 in 2014. It is based on a great collection of photos showing the way of that unit in WW1 - La Bassée, Verdun, Chemie des Dames, the spring offensive 1918, retreat...

The Wesel fortress.


This is the gate that survived the heavy bombing....

...which made the city look like this:


The old entrance of the citadel survived:


Inside the citadel:

To the right of these buildings the Wesel Municipal Archives (Stadtarchiv) reside nowadays.

Tons of history... I easily get carried away on this...

 

Thanks Alex for an excellent summary of Wesel's past history. I wonder was I looking at the Kronprinz and Kronprizessin sections of the fortress?


I have always been interested in fortress history. I find Vauban's construction of fortresses also interesting regarding French military history. It is said he constructed 40 fortresses to defend French borders during the wars of Louis XIV....Maginot fortresses of their time.

What I remember about modern day Friedrichsfeld, it appears to be a dormitory of Wesel rather than a separate village as it was 100 years ago.

 

Hello Harry Ree,

this should give you some orientation:

Before WW1 at Friedrichsfeld there used to be the Military training area for Wesel's regiments - there were wooden huts and other simple installations, too. Hence the conversion into a POW camp. Same in WW2, in 1940 British and French POW began arriving in Wesel on Rhine barges. From Wesel they continued on foot. They looked tired and haggard and hungry, my uncle told me - he was 15 then. He swopped cigarettes against a British and a French helmet… before that the German guard had to be bribed with cigarettes, too. Less than five years later, my Uncle was a POW himself - in Russia. He came back the day after Christmas 1949.

 

Alex, from what you have displayed, I was correct in thinking what I described as a semi circle was indeed the Konigprinz and Kronprizessin sections of the fortress. I wish I would have been able to stay longer in the area. We were on our way further east at the time.

Interesting account of your uncle's recollection of the war. Did he record a deeper account of his service on the Eastern Front? I think your uncle was lucky to have been returned so early as 1949 from Russia many did not return until Adenauer had paved the way by his visit to Russia in 1955.

Aside, I think postwar Germany has a lot to thank Adenauer for. He presided over the economic miracle and industrial recovery for Western Germany and won the respect of the Western Powers. His past was ideologically clean of the NS regime and I would think he was fortunate not to have lost his life after his arrest by the Gestapo in 1944.He lived to tell the tale and held the post of Chancellor of the German Federal Republic longer than Hitler did as Chancellor of the Third Reich.

 

Harry, I agree with what you say about Adenauer. He was the right man for the job and the man of the hour. And he is still held in hight regard here in Germany. The last 10000 POW came home in 1955 but the bulk, hundreds of thousands, were repatriated in 1948/1949. 1948 was also the time when Britain released the last German POW still working in the UK. Many had previously been held in camps in the USA, they had to serve some more time in British custody. Many have extremely positive recollections of their time in Britain, especially the ones who were relatively young at the time.

My uncle Carl sat down after his 85th birthday and wrote it all down - it took him a while and he was reluctant to let me see it. But at one point he gave it to me, he seemed ready to share it. I am a trained newspaper journalist - and so I proofread it, suggested some slight revisions and we made it into a book that we published privately, just 100 copies. What he had written (by hand) was good - especially considering that he was a workingman. But he was always an avid reader. He started training as a bricklayer when he was 14 years old - that was the age at which most finished school. Being a bricklayer and being only 20 years old helped him a lot in Russia - they had some use for him.
When the book was ready in 2018 he was very, very proud - and content: he had told his story and friends and family could read what he had been through and how he had coped with it all. It was all very matter-of fact, no complaining, no animosity towards the people he had met in the Soviet Union. There were more good people that bad people and many helped him to survive. Perhaps he was just lucky, but it also seems to be a matter of what kind of personality you have and how you approach people. Carl died last February, aged 94.

This is what he still had from his years in the Soviet Union: A little wooden suitcase (too small for a suit!), puttees, a hand stitched improvised haversack and a mess tin made by someone in the camp. It was made from (aircraft?) aluminium plates which had been delivered by the Americans to the Soviets during WW2. He traded it for a day's ration of bread in a POW camp in Minsk.

 

Alex. Good account of your Uncle Carl's experience as a POW in Russia with you able to fine tune it fit for publishing. The accounts of the common soldier are always much different to those of the very senior military figures whose conditions in captivity were far removed from the rank and file.

It was question of POWs having to adapt to the circumstances that they found themselves in. In Russian hands it would be difficult to find help if an escape was attempted. Different to the situation in Poland where Allied escapees could be guaranteed of help, sometimes in the depth of winter.

In Britain and North America quite a number of POWs both German and Italian stayed behind, being employed in local communities then marrying into local stock.

At work we had a foreman who told me he was captured off Boulogne in 1944 while serving in the Kreigsmarine. After living in England since then, he retired at the time of German reunification and relocated to the former East Germany where he originated from. Seems strange regarding the situation in East Germany but he was drawn to his homeland.