One of the big parks in the city of Cologne is "Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Park".  It's pretty amazing to think about it, but we didn't build The Bomb to use on Japan--it was built to end the war in Europe.  So big German cities like Cologne are pretty damned glad the war ended when it did, and not a few months later!

Frankly, Hiroshima-Nagasaki-Park isn't all that great of a park--there's always lots of trash blowing around, and there are LOTS of homeless people there.  However, the STORY behind the park is pretty interesting, as you'll see below.

This satellite picture shows where I live (yellow circle), where the park is (red circle), and where the Dom is (green circle).

So, the story of this park is a tragic one, in several ways.

After coming to power in the 1930s, the Nazis were having a heck of a time holding on to control in some parts of Germany.  If it has always seemed to you like it would be hard to get millions of people to believe the crap Hitler was saying, you're right.  Cologne had always been a thriving trading city with an affluent and well-respected Jewish community.  (In fact, there is a stone monument in the Dom called "The Privilege of the Jews" that was erected centuries ago.  On that monument, the bishop agrees to defend the rights of the Jewish community of Cologne.)

So, the people in Cologne didn't much care for the new Nazi rules and policies.  Don't get me wrong-- they didn't really FIGHT them either, but they didn't support them.

But the Nazis were smart.  They knew that they would never be able to do the things they wanted to do without the support of certain key cities.  So they knew that they had to find a way to make the people in Cologne more supportive of the Nazi regime.

Shortly before the war broke out, the Nazi government unveiled plans for a new cultural and business center in Cologne.  A big part of the western suburbs of the city would be bulldozed, and new museums, opera houses, and businesses would go in.  There would be a beautiful reflecting pond, parade grounds, and so on.

This plan appealled to the vanity of the people in Cologne-- their city would be a new capital of culture in Europe.  Suddenly, everyone was a Nazi.

So, ironically, just before the war, Germany bulldozed a big chunk of one of their biggest cities themselves!  The demolition was completed, creating a huge tract of open land on the western side of the city.

They also put in the lake, but that's all the farther the project got during the war.

Cologne was basically destroyed during the war.  The British bombed Cologne on literally hundreds of nights.  Virtually none of the buildings in the inner city were inhabitable by the end of the war.

So, now it's 1945-1946.  Cologne is a big pile of rubble, and there's no place to put it all...

...except on the grounds of this proposed "cultural and business capital", which clearly will now never get built.

See all the hills in the background of these pictures?  That's all rubble from WWII.  Seriously-- Cologne is completely flat otherwise.

So now, when people in Cologne go to the park to play soccer or have a barbeque, they are playing on a park built by Nazis to buy the loyalty of their city, and the hills in the park are made of the rubble from the war.

Wow.

I hadn't really noticed how incredibly dry it has been this summer until I went to the park today.  Notice that the grass is all dead.  Actually, some of the trees in my neighborhood have lost their leaves already!

So, the story of the park is pretty sad, but in some ways, that's Germany.  I mean, frankly, they had a pretty rough century, being on the front lines of WWI, WWII and the Cold War.  I guess that if you can put up a beer garden in the park and move on, things aren't all bad, right?

Besides, there wasn't much else they COULD do.