We left the bummer that was Dachau and headed for the annual Oktoberfest.  This is Munich’s once a year really big deal.  They say about 6 million people converge on the city for the big beer party.  It has a real carnival atmosphere with rides and games and enormous beer tents.  We went into the largest one, the Lowenbrau tent.  It hardly looks like a tent, more like a building.

I always assumed this event went on in all German cities but no.  Munich started it in 1810 as a wedding celebration for some aristocrat or other and it has been going on ever since.  It was suspended in the last years of the war for obvious reasons.

Lucky for us we had a reserved table because the place was packed with people of all ages singing and men dressed in lederhosen and the girls in dirndl folk dresses.  The beers were liter size and they were packing them away.  When someone stood up on a table with a beer stein they had to chug the whole beer while everyone hoot and hollered and clapped.  I fought the urge to get up on the table.  I wish Chrissy and Clint could have been there.  It would have been heaven for them!

Lunch was, of course, sausage and sauerkraut and German potato salad.  Most of their meat is porked based as the cows here are used mainly for milk.  Our tour guide told us to not order a steak  because we would be disappointed.

We had time to walk around the festival after lunch and as I didn’t pack enough warm clothes I ended up buying some tshirts to layer in.  Later that night I found a store near our hotel and bought yet another winter coat.

Back on the bus for a walking tour of Munich.  We got back down to the nitty gritty of the origins of the Third Reich.  The movement was born in Munich in the early 1920’s.  Hitler was a mere corporal in WW1 and after the end of that war he became a little spy for the army.  They sent him in to see what the National Socialists were up to at their meetings.  There were hundreds of paramilitary political groups organized after the war.  He ended up agreeing with their policies and joined the party.  He found that, after some coaching and polishing by others, he had a gift for public speaking and getting the crowd stirred up.  He had no formal education in public policy, politics, or history but he could whip up a crowd with his “Make Germany Great Again” speeches.  Sound familiar?

We visited the place where he made his first public speech.  It was bombed and rebuilt after the war and is now an Apple store!

The party staged the famous Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 (an attempted forced takeover of government that was hatched in a beer hall- it still stands as a beer hall today and we walked through it) that failed; 6 men died and Hitler and Rudolf Hess, his secretary,  were sentenced to 5 years in prison.  He was treated quite well in prison and dictated his book to Hess, “Mein Kampf” which laid out with no uncertain doubt his screwed up thoughts and plans for the world which incuded his antisemite terror fantasies, which later he made come true.

He was released after only 10 months but he and the Nazi party were forbidden to make any more public speeches.  They thought they were rid of the Nazi scurge but after a few years went by they crept back in and no one stopped them.  The rest is history.  Our tour guide, the American, obviously leans to the left and got his shots in about what is going on in the US now as it parallells the early days of the Third Reich.  I got it but I’m not sure all my fellow travelers did.  I have a strong feeling my political thoughts may not be in sync with most of these nice people.  I will try and keep my thoughts to myself, but you know how difficult that is for me!

Here’s a fun fact.  If any German citizen is caught giving the Nazi salute in public they will be fined one month’s pay.  If they do it again it’s 3 months in jail.  They do not mess around.

Tomorrow we visit the Nazi parade grounds and the party rally amphitheater in Nuremburg.