Saturday, July 16, 2011

Castles and Dynamite Factories


The last few days have been pretty interesting, but the highlight was definitely the "Exploseum," an abandoned German explosives factory from when Bydgoszcz, Poland was occupied by the Germans during World War II. Before we get to that, I'll talk about what else we did in the past few days. I also have some pictures from the museum and the rest of the trip uploaded, so I'll post the links for those at the end of the entry.

After waking up in Nidzica on Thursday, we decided to visit the castle again, but for an actual tour. Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing in English, so I didn't get much out of it, but I got to see some of the architecture and tools used by the Teutonic Knights in their castles 600 years ago. After the hour-long tour, I returned to my grandfather's house for some lunch. After lunch, we had a 4-hour car-ride back to Bydgoszcz. On the way, we stopped at a castle ruin in Brodnica, where all that remains is a single tower and the ruins around it. Unfortunately, since it was after 5 o'clock, the tower was closed, but we still got to see the grounds with some original castle ruins. After arriving in Bydgoszcz, we did nothing but relax for the rest of the evening.

Friday wasn't too much of an eventful day either, but I drove through downtown Bydgoszcz and waited at the train station to drop off and say goodbye to my cousin and her daughter who were leaving to go to their hometown in another part of Poland. After that, I went to my uncle's new apartment to relax again for a while.

Today, we woke up and pretty much immediately went to the brand new "Exploseum", opened last week. The actual museum and tour gave only a glimpse of the 23 square kilometer complex, which could still have unexploded mines in the still-abandoned areas. The factory was one of the many factories for the DAG explosives corporation. The Bromberg (the name of Bydgoszcz under Germany) complex however was the largest and most productive, providing almost 80% of DAG's explosives.

To actually get to the complex, we took a bus to the outskirts of the city, and followed a road to the end where a small crowd of people were waiting. We weren't quite sure if we were in the right place, as there were no signs whatsoever about any museum or tour, and even the people waiting said that they "hoped" that somebody would pick them up for the museum/tour. Finally, an unmarked tour bus came to the area we were waiting, and people started to enter, asking no questions about the Exploseum. Everyone just assumed it was what we were looking for. Sure enough, the bus took us to the ticket office of the museum, where we signed a waiver and began our tour. The museum could definitely use some better marketing tactic here.

Unfortunately, there was no English guide, text, or brochure anywhere in the museum or on the tour, so my dad had to help interpret what I was looking at, but the tour was very interesting nonetheless. We began going through rooms that were once used to produce the ingredients for nitroglycerin, the main ingredient in TNT. The exhibits discussed Alfred Nobel's discovery of the substance, and then showed some of the many Polish Nobel prize winners, including Marie Curie. Next, we took some tunnels to the next building, where some of the history of the complex itself was discussed. The factory was one of the biggest suppliers for the Third Reich during World War II after it was built. To keep it hidden from aerial view, the Germans covered the tops of many of the buildings with dirt and vegetation. Because the complex was also quite deep into the woods, it was nearly undetectable from the air.

We then continued through some of the tunnels and entered some of the rooms where the nitroglycerin was created. Something interesting the tour guide pointed out was the emergency plan. The mixing rooms were designed so that one side of the room was exposed to the outside with glass, while all of the other sides were covered with concrete. On the side opposite from the concrete was an emergency evacuation tunnel. The idea of this was that if there was an explosion, it would have been directed outside while the workers would use the evacuation tunnels less affected by the explosions. The redirection of the blast would also prevent the explosion from destroying the rest of the facility Whether this would work in practice was fortunately, never put to the test.

One of the next areas we visited was completely converted to a museum about the history of war. The top floor began with some of the weapons of war used in medieval times, such as swords, catapults, and maces, among other things. There was also an interesting chart that began on the this top floor and went through all four floors of the building. It was about the number of deaths from many conflicts and wars in the past. Many notable wars, like the Spanish Civil War and American Civil War were listed and their death counts of about 600,000 barely made a mark on the graph. Some other conflicts, like World War I with 15 million deaths, went down an entire floor. World War II's bar however went down all four floors with a staggering 55 million deaths.

The next floor's exhibit was an evolution of the previous one. Now, weapons of war included muskets and cannons, and it showed how they slowly evolved into rifles, carbines, machine guns, and submachine guns. I actually got to hold a Thompson submachine gun. I never realized how heavy such a small-looking gun could be. Even without any ammunition, firing it packed a punch. The next floor showed airplanes used during World War II and nuclear weapons. I learned not only about the bombs dropped on Japan during World War II, but also about the projects done by countries around the world after the war to develop thermonuclear weapons. One of these, the Czar Bomb of the Soviet Union was so massive that the explosion would completely obliterate anything in a 100km radius, and even shatter windows over 1000km away. Just its actual fireball had a 4km radius.

The final floor's exhibit showed some of the most significant battles in history. Included were the Invasion of Normandy, Battle of Waterloo, the Battle of Gettysburg, and the Battle of Verdun. Some famous quotes about war were also displayed around the room. The next building, which was where the nitroglycerin explosives were actually packaged, showed the life of the average employee at the factory, and factories like the one in Bromberg. The final building, where the nitroglycerin "dough" was rolled into packagable rolls, had a room dedicated to the Red Army, which completely stripped the factory of all of its equipment when they conquered Poland towards the end of World War II.

After the final room, we took the tour bus back, and a regular city bus back to my grandparents. When we arrived, four hours had passed, and I had learned a lot about Germany, explosives, and war in general. I was quite impressed with the museum, and with some improvement, I believe that it could become a major tourist attraction for people visiting from around the world. It's only been open for a week, so there is definitely room for improvement. For what it was, I thought it was incredibly interesting. I'm now going to spend the rest of the day with family, and tomorrow I'll be going to one of my family's farms, so I won't be reporting back for a few days.

If you'd like to see pictures from the explosives factory, check out my gallery here: http://picasaweb.google.com/GuitarGodAdamp/DAGBrombergExploseum
I also have a gallery of the few pictures I took in Dublin here: http://picasaweb.google.com/GuitarGodAdamp/Dublin2011Visit1
I'll definitely try to take more pictures from now on, because I think they supplement the blog entries very well.

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