Hello to all Hive friends! 👋🏻
Today in my post I will tell you more about anothet interesting landmark in Germany - Friedland museum!
Hope you will like it! 🥰
The museum is located in Friedland, just a ten-minute train ride from Göttingen. In the past, Friedland was right on the border between East and West Germany. This is exactly what the museum is about. In it you can find a lot of information about the Second World War and more precisely the period after it. It is a very interesting for me topic and that is why I decided to visit this place.
Immediately after the war, a camp was built in the city. It served as the first transit stop for many refugees and returning soldiers.
We were quite surprised from the very beginning. The museum is made extremely interactive. At the entrance you are given a device through which you can listen all the time to the history and life of the camp in the years after the war.
Some of the interactive screens in the museum
I was impressed by the organization of this camp and the number of people who went through it. Thanks to this place, thousands of people have managed to return to their homeland, and hundreds of missing have been found. They were mostly people from Poland, but there were also many from the Soviet Union, France, England and others.
I was also surprised by the way I worked at the camp. Everything was done according to a certain protocol. Each arrival received a registration card as in the photos below. Those who did not receive the necessary documents were not allowed to continue. Every newcomer has undergone medical tests to prevent epidemics. It is amazing how all this was organized after such a devastating war.
However, it was not easy at all. There were times when providing for food and clothing was almost impossible. It was also very interesting to learn about the missing person detection service. Initially, a person looking for another filled in two cards with personal information, which was used to search. However, many children did not remember their names, while others had white spots about what had happened and the search was very difficult. That's why the service introduced personal interviews with people and a photo archive for a safer and more accurate search. I was amazed when I saw this one - dozens of books with photos and information about passers-by. After the introduction of the photos, more than 250,000 people were found by their
relatives.
We also learned a lot about the German soldiers who were held hostage in the Soviet Union and how difficult it was. We also saw scale models of the Reaching for Freedom statue and Friedland bell, which were built after the war and became a symbol of their return.
The museum is not one of the largest and most famous, but it was an extremely interesting experience to learn so much about the post-war period and the camp.
I hope you liked it!