Der Brocken 1945

I have been posting almost daily Tweets of Goethe's diary for December 1777, when Goethe was traveling in the Harz visiting various mining sites and also making his famous ascent of the Brocken. As I mentioned in my previous post, the journey made great physical demands. Snow, sleet, hail, fog, and then there were days when Goethe climbed down into the shafts of mines. On December 12, 1777, he descended into three pits of a silver mine in St. Andreasberg: Samson, Neufang, and Gottesgnade. The former, Grube Samson, even has a Wikipedia entry. It is 810 meters deep, and Goethe wrote afterward in his diary: "ward mir sehr sauer diesmal."

The larger towns on his route can be found on online maps of the Harz (Clausthal, Mühlhausen), but not the many mining villages: Duderstadt, Dammhaus, Silkeroda, and so on. But I keep looking, hoping to find such a map. Today, however, I came across quite unexpectedly the map at the top of this post, showing the path of the American troops who stormed the Brocken on April 20, 1945. According to the accompanying post, at the beginning of April 40.000 male prisoners from the concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora (and its "satellites" in Ellrich, Nüxei, Wieda, Mackenrode und Osterhagen) as well as from the concentration camp Brunshausen near Bad Gandersheim were death marched through the Harz. The goal of the death march was to reach towns that had a rail connection to Ravensbruck or Dachau. 10,000 died on the march. Click on the image to enlarge. For those who don't know German, "KZ" on the map represents "concentration camp."

It's sobering to consider that it was over the same paths that so many of those prisoners died.