Nuremberg

Mon., Nov. 9 (Day 8) - Today we docked at the German town of Nuremberg. We disembarked and took a bus tour of the city. Nuremberg was the geographic center of the German Third Reich. It was a place of many gatherings and meetings, and there were many public rallies that took place here. These rallies drew as many as a million people in a city of 400,000, and sometimes the rallies lasted for a week. Because of the city's prominence, it was heavily bombed during the war, and a lot of the original city was destroyed. Much of what we saw today has been re-built since then. There were 2 options for the tours: a deep in history tour, where you actually got off the bus and went inside the World War 2 historical places, and a drive-by tour, where you drove by the historical sites, but didn't get off the bus. We did the drive-by tour. Some of the"sightseeing" in German towns is very somber, because the sights are places that were very much at the forefront of Nazism. In Nuremberg, we drove by the offices where the SS Nazis were stationed, and Zeppelin Field that was built as a place for Hitler to give speeches. We also drove by the Palace of Justice, where the Nuremberg Trials (where the Nazi leaders were tried) were held. We were told that there is a trial going on there this week; a man is on trial for denying the holocaust, which is a crime in Germany today. We drove by a Jewish cemetery which is the only Jewish cemetery in Nuremberg that hadn't been destroyed during the war. We also drove by a Christian cemetery, which is the most photographed cemetery in Germany. It was beautiful, with lots of flowers on the graves. It almost looked like a park. We were told that in Germany, people don't purchase plots for graves, they merely rent them for 20 or 30 years, at which time the bones are then removed and emptied into a mass grave in order to make room for "a new tenant". We did get off the bus to walk around the grounds of the Imperial Palace. This would have been the palace where the emperor of the German Empire stayed when he was visiting his subjects. From the palace, we walked to Old Town, the heart of historic Nuremberg. Along the way, we passed a few churches. There is one Catholic church in Nuremberg and a few Protestant churches. However, the churches all look alike. This is because they were all built in the twelfth century, or earlier, which means they were built by Catholics. When the Protestant reformation occurred, the protestants did not build their own churches; they just took over the Catholic ones. As a result, the Protestant churches look like Catholic churches with stained glass windows, statues, relics of saints inside, and possessing saints' names. Therefore it is practically impossible to tell whether a church is a Catholic or Protestant church merely by its name or by looking at it. The only way to tell if it is a Catholic church is to go inside and see if the red light is burning above the tabernacle. If you see that, then you know it's a Catholic church. After our walking tour ended, we had some free time, and walked around town. We found some craft shops, where we wandered around awhile, and eventually headed back to the bus to return to the ship.