Regensburg - Bamberg, Germany

Monday 12th July 1999

First stop today was Nuremberg, famous for Hitler's Nuremberg rallies, as he was building support for his party, and the Nuremberg Trials, the location being a symbolic gesture of the defeat of Nazism. On the way in to the city we passed the Reichsparteitagsgelände, a huge, never-completed, complex designed to house the huge rallies, with a stadium planned to seat 400,000.

The centre of the city had been virtually demolished during the final stages of the war but the rebuilding effort has been remarkable. The area around the cathedral contains a number of apparently old buildings but a display in the cathedral shows the whole region destroyed. Other parts of the city have similarly recovered.

Our exploration of the town was interrupted by a brief sharp storm but we managed to see all the main features and decided to move on. We stopped by the road near the town of Bamberg, our goal for tomorrow.