Revisiting a Divided Nation: U.S. Camp Point Alpha
I remember traveling here maybe 25 years ago, and people couldn't wait to bury the past in this remote area of the Rhön Mountains, like a neighborhood dog trying to conceal the drippings of his roaming predecessor by energetically kicking up the dirt to cover up any evidence that he was ever here.
You can hardly blame people here for thinking like that. This is your prototypical model train landscape: rolling hills, winding roads, rustic houses with all the bucolic charm of Old Europe, a herd of cows or sheep dotting the hillsides. Hard to believe that this was part of a political world stage too surreal for even our 21st Century reality show geared imagination.
People were well aware of the Berlin Wall a few hundred miles to the northeast. That said, not many citizens cared to make the trip from their safe confines of wherever they were in the Federal Republic of Germany (known simply as 'West Germany' back then) through the People's Republic of Germany (known as East Germany, or the DDR) to West (and East, were they so inclined) Berlin, cultural capital of the country or not. They didn't have to be that concerned. Meet the Berlin Wall's ugly and equally lethal cousin, the East German-West German border, usually in the form of a ten-foot metal fence that separated east from west, or one huge swath of noman's land from another.
Today, of course, time has made up for indifference, so that there is a museum, a walk of shame featuring sculptures, and the grand prize of them all: the small, football field-sized U.S. Camp Point Alpha, the observation point built by the U.S. to keep tabs on potential Warsaw Pact troop movements, should they ever occur. Nestled on the Rasdorf Berg between the two states of Hesse (representing the west) and Thuringia (the east), Camp Point Alpha couldn't feel more remote if you built it on the moon. This was known as the 'Fulda Gap', the area NATO considered the prime infiltration point for enemy troops.
The first thing the visitor will notice is the fact that the U.S. observation tower is a mere stone's throw from the East German watchtower. The troops on both sides of the border would have had to be blindfolded to not get a closeup look of their counterparts staring at them from the other side. While the U.S. troops were instructed to look for potential enemy movement which never came, the East German Border Police's job was a little more straightforward: armed with a rifle and binoculars, they were to stop any East German's escape to the west with a bullet, if necessary.
At least in this area, not many escape attempts were made, with the few ones ending in disaster. History took care of the rest: in 1990, U.S troops went on their last patrol before a halt was called to border observations following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unofficial end of the Cold War. For people interested in this type of history, this might be the best exhibit outside of Berlin. More than the winds will give you a chill here in the Rhön Mountains, which is the intention. Imagine the Cold War in such a remote place. And then shake your head once you realize it actually did.
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