After doing the weekend shopping in Mellrichstadt (previously), we stopped in the in the Hainberg Arreal on the edge of town for a walk on the groups of the mothballed border garrison of the Cold War. By the old security gate there was a collection of the kind of tanks from the motor pool and the headquarters building preserved in its original condition, furnished as it was during its forty-four year history as home base to the 352nd Panzer Grenadier Battalion of the West German Bundeswehr.
The
museum and documentation centre was closed when we visited but I got immediate feelings of nostalgia for the former US army barracks in Wรผrzburg, Kitzigen, Schweinfurt, Giebelstadt, etc, etc with the same general layout and style of the few representative structures—which of course were German-built and occupied by the Allies at the end of World War II—but learned it contains the command room with access to the bunker and fallout shelter (
see also, worth going back for) as well as an arms room and information on the unit’s patrols and foreign missions up to Afghanistan in 2006 after which the brigade was disbanded and the base closed.
