From Dreiborn we eventually went to the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang, one of the largest surviving architectural complexes created by National Socialism in Germany.
Our own visit was quite limited. We reached the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang and saw the enormous complex from the outside, but we did not go into the National Socialist Documentation Centre at Vogelsang International Place or visit the permanent exhibition. Even from outside, however, the scale of the site makes it obvious that this was never intended to be an ordinary school.
The National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang covers roughly 100 hectares on a steep hillside above the Urft Reservoir in the Eifel. The buildings, terraces, sports grounds, assembly spaces and tower were deliberately arranged across the landscape so that the architecture itself would convey hierarchy, discipline and power.
The word Ordensburg is slightly misleading. The National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang was not a medieval castle and had nothing to do with the historical military or religious orders that the name might suggest. Ordensburg was a term deliberately adopted by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party to give its new political training centres an invented sense of tradition, exclusivity and elite status.
The decision to create these training centres was taken in 1933. Construction of the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang began in March 1934.
The project was overseen politically by Robert Ley, Reich Organisation Leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and leader of the German Labour Front. The principal architect was Clemens Klotz, a Cologne architect who became closely associated with the monumental architecture of National Socialism.
The National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang was one of three main institutions of this type constructed for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The other two were the National Socialist Ordensburg Sonthofen in the Allgäu region of Bavaria and the National Socialist Ordensburg Krössinsee in Pomerania, in territory that is now part of Poland.
They were intended to train a new generation of political functionaries for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
The National Socialist regime did not simply need civil servants capable of carrying out administrative work. Its leadership wanted ideologically committed men who would accept the racial, political and authoritarian principles of National Socialism and eventually occupy positions of authority throughout the party and the territories controlled by Germany.
The men chosen for this training were commonly called Ordensjunker.
The term again borrowed deliberately from an older aristocratic and military vocabulary. It suggested membership of a political elite and helped to construct an identity around obedience, comradeship, physical strength and service to the National Socialist state.
The first major construction phase of the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang was completed in 1936. Adolf Hitler formally opened the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang on 2 May 1936, and the first training courses began that year.
Education at the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang was not primarily an academic university-style education.
Political indoctrination was central.
The trainees were taught the National Socialist view of race, national community and leadership. Physical exercise and sport also occupied a major place in daily life. The ideal being promoted was masculine, physically strong, obedient and politically committed.
The purpose was therefore not merely to teach National Socialist ideology as a collection of political ideas. The entire environment was intended to shape behaviour.
Architecture played an important part in that process.
The National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang stretches for more than a kilometre from the entrance area across a plateau and down a steep hillside. The organisation of the complex created large spaces for collective ceremonies while the surrounding Eifel landscape became part of the visual effect.
Among the principal surviving elements are the former Eagle Courtyard, the Comradeship Houses, the Hundred-Man Houses, the sports facilities, the open-air assembly area sometimes referred to as the Thingstätte, the Burgschänke tavern building and the approximately 48-metre-high tower.
The tower was one of the most dominant architectural elements. It contained spaces including a lecture hall and the so-called Hall of Honour.
The Comradeship Houses were accommodation buildings in which the trainees lived together. Their design reflected one of the central ideas of the National Socialist training system: the individual was supposed to become part of a disciplined political community rather than remain an independent person.
The former Eagle Courtyard functioned as one of the central spaces of the complex. Today the modern visitor centre of Vogelsang International Place deliberately stands inside the former Eagle Courtyard. Its glass and steel architecture was designed to contrast visibly with the heavy stone architecture of the National Socialist period rather than imitate it.
Even the buildings that were never completed are significant.
The National Socialist leadership planned an enormous House of Knowledge on the plateau. The proposed structure would have occupied a ground area of approximately 100 by 220 metres and was intended to become an ideological centre of the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang.
Only foundation work had begun when the Second World War interrupted construction.
That is an important point about the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang: despite its enormous size, the project visitors see today is incomplete.
The National Socialist regime had planned something even larger.
Training at the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang lasted only from 1936 until the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939. Once the war began, the normal Ordensjunker training programme was suspended and the continuing construction programme was largely stopped.
That short operating period does not make the institution historically unimportant.
Research carried out by the National Socialist Documentation Centre at Vogelsang International Place has examined what happened to the men who had passed through the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang.
Several hundred former Ordensburg trainees subsequently served in German-occupied Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Some became perpetrators or accomplices in crimes committed under German occupation.
This connection is essential to understanding the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang.
It would be misleading to present the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang merely as an interesting piece of monumental architecture or an abandoned ideological school. The ideas taught there were connected to a political system that created persecution, occupation and mass murder.
The present permanent exhibition at the National Socialist Documentation Centre at Vogelsang International Place is therefore called “Destiny: Master Race. National Socialist Ordensburgen Between Fascination and Crime”.
The exhibition deliberately studies the individual trainees as well as the institution.
It asks why young men found National Socialism attractive, what opportunities they believed the National Socialist system offered them, how their sense of belonging and social advancement developed, and how personal responsibility operated inside a dictatorship.
The exhibition does not treat the trainees simply as people who were mechanically transformed into criminals.
Instead, it examines their choices.
That distinction matters because explaining ideological indoctrination should not remove individual responsibility. The National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang created an environment intended to encourage particular beliefs and forms of behaviour, but the people trained there still made decisions about how they later acted.
After the original Ordensjunker training ended in 1939, the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang continued to be used.
Between 1942 and 1944, pupils from three Adolf Hitler Schools were temporarily accommodated at the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang.
The Adolf Hitler Schools were boarding schools created to educate selected young people according to National Socialist political and racial ideas.
In 1944, members of the Hitler Youth were also given military training at the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang before being sworn in and sent into military service.
The final months of the Second World War brought physical destruction to parts of the complex.
Allied bombing damaged and destroyed several buildings, and soldiers of the United States Army occupied the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang on 4 February 1945.
The history of the site then changed completely.
In 1946, the British military established a large military training area around the former National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang. The nearby village of Wollseifen was forcibly evacuated because it lay inside the new training area.
In 1950, responsibility for the military training area passed to the Belgian Armed Forces.
The Belgian Armed Forces operated the site as Camp Vogelsang for more than half a century, from 1950 until 2005.
The Belgian military period altered the site again. Existing National Socialist buildings were reused, while new military buildings were constructed. One important example is the Van Dooren barracks building, erected in the early 1950s on foundations that had originally been prepared for the unfinished National Socialist House of Knowledge.
For decades, ordinary visitors could not simply explore the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang because it formed part of an active military area.
That isolation ended only in the twenty-first century.
The Eifel National Park was established in 2004. The Belgian Armed Forces ended their use of Camp Vogelsang in 2005, and on 1 January 2006 the former National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang was opened to the public.
The challenge was then what to do with it.
Demolishing everything would remove one of the largest surviving architectural examples of National Socialist political education.
Preserving the buildings without interpretation, however, risked turning monumental National Socialist architecture into something that could be admired without understanding why it existed.
The solution has been to preserve the former National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang while deliberately changing its purpose.
The site is now called Vogelsang International Place.
Vogelsang International Place presents itself as a centre for historical education, democracy, tolerance, diversity and peaceful coexistence — values intentionally opposed to those for which the National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang was created.
The central Forum at Vogelsang International Place opened in its present form in 2016. It contains both the National Socialist Documentation Centre at Vogelsang International Place and the Eifel National Park Centre.
That combination is unusual but logical.
One side explains the human history of a landscape that was used for National Socialist political education and later military training. The other explains the natural landscape of the Eifel National Park that now surrounds the same buildings.
The National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang is therefore several historical places occupying exactly the same ground.
From 1934 it was a monumental construction project of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
From 1936 it was a training centre for future National Socialist political leaders.
During the Second World War it was used by the Adolf Hitler Schools and for military preparation.
After 1945 it became military territory.
From 1950 until 2005 it was Camp Vogelsang of the Belgian Armed Forces.
Since 2006 it has been Vogelsang International Place, a protected historical site and centre for education and documentation inside the Eifel National Park.
Our own experience covered only the exterior of that enormous history.
We arrived at the former National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang, looked at the buildings and the landscape around them, but ultimately did not enter the National Socialist Documentation Centre at Vogelsang International Place.
Even from outside, the architecture is enough to understand one thing.
The National Socialist Ordensburg Vogelsang was designed to impress people.
What the buildings cannot explain by themselves is what that impression was meant to achieve.
For that, the history matters more than the architecture.