Wewelsburg

Stand still for a moment on the approach. The ground rises under your feet, and the castle sits on a spur of rock above the valley of the Alme river. The walls are pale and plastered. Three towers mark the corners. On a clear day the wind comes up from the fields below and carries the smell of cut grass and damp stone. It looks like a peaceful country residence. For most of its life, that is exactly what it was.

Wewelsburg stands in a small village of the same name, a short drive from Paderborn, in the forests and farmland of eastern Westphalia. Before you go inside, walk a little way around the outside. Notice the shape. This is not a square fortress and not a rambling medieval keep. It is a triangle. Two corners carry domed towers. The third, to the north, carries a much larger round tower. Triangular castles are very rare in Germany, and this layout follows the narrow point of the hill.

The building you see today dates from the early seventeenth century. It was built for Dietrich von Fürstenberg, the prince-bishop of Paderborn. A prince-bishop was a churchman who also ruled a territory like a secular lord, with courts, taxes and castles. Dietrich wanted a second residence and a symbol of his power. He chose a site that already had a long history of fortifications, and his builders put up a new castle in the style historians now call the Weser Renaissance.

That term needs a short explanation. The Weser Renaissance is a regional form of Renaissance architecture from the area around the Weser river, here in northwestern Germany. Builders took ideas from Italy and the Netherlands — ornament, symmetry, decorative gables — and joined them to local traditions of stone building. At Wewelsburg the style is restrained. Look for the curved tower caps and the regular rows of windows. This was a home meant to impress, but not to frighten.

The centuries that followed were not kind to it. During the Thirty Years' War, the long religious conflict that tore through central Europe in the seventeenth century, the castle was damaged. It was repaired. Later, when the church territories of Germany were dissolved at the start of the nineteenth century, the prince-bishopric came to an end and the castle passed into state hands. Parts of the building fell into decay. For a time it was little more than a large, quiet ruin above a farming village.

In the twentieth century the local district took over the castle and gave it new life. It became a museum of local history and a youth hostel, a place where school groups and hikers slept under old beams. If the story ended there, Wewelsburg would be a pleasant regional castle. But in the 1930s something very different arrived on this hill... and that is the reason many visitors come today.

After the Nazis took power, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, took control of the castle. The SS was the Nazi party's elite organisation, responsible for terror, police power and, later, the concentration camps. Himmler wanted Wewelsburg as a centre for SS ideology — a place for training, ritual and pseudo-historical research. He imagined the castle as the heart of a vast complex, and architects drew plans for a huge expansion around the village. Most of those plans were never built.

What was built came at a terrible human cost. The SS set up a concentration camp near the village, called Niederhagen. Prisoners were forced to work on the castle, in its quarries and on building sites. Many were worked to death, starved, or killed. More than a thousand people died there. This is the fact that many visitors miss when they see only the pretty Renaissance walls. The restoration of this building and the suffering of these prisoners are part of the same story.

The north tower holds the most disturbing traces of that era. The SS rebuilt its interior. On the upper level is a large round hall. In the floor there is a dark mosaic of a sun wheel with twelve spokes. Below lies a domed crypt, a round chamber with a ring of stone around a central point. Historians still debate exactly how the SS intended to use these rooms. Today the floor symbol is often called the Black Sun, and modern extremists have adopted it — which is why the museum explains it with such care.

In the final weeks of the Second World War, as Allied troops approached in 1945, the SS tried to destroy the castle. They set explosives and fire, and much of the building burned out. Only the outer walls of large parts survived. After the war the castle was rebuilt again, step by step. So when you look at these walls, you are looking at layers: Renaissance stone, nineteenth century neglect, Nazi reconstruction, wartime destruction and post-war repair.

Today Wewelsburg holds two very different museums. One is the historical museum of the prince-bishopric of Paderborn, with objects from the region's long history. The other is a memorial and documentation centre about the ideology and terror of the SS, set in the former SS guard building in the castle forecourt. It explains who the SS were, how they thought, and who their victims were. Give it real time. It is serious, careful, and very well made.

The youth hostel still operates here too. That is perhaps the second great surprise of this place. Young people sleep and eat in a building that was once meant to train an elite of racial hatred. Many school groups come specifically to learn about that history. In the village, you can also find a memorial to the prisoners of the Niederhagen camp. It is quiet, and easy to walk past. It deserves a few minutes of your attention.

Before you leave, walk back out to the edge of the hill and look down into the Alme valley. Listen to the wind in the trees and the ordinary sounds of the village — a car, a dog, a church bell. Then turn and look once more at the three towers. The castle is calm in the afternoon light. It has been a bishop's pride, a ruin, a hostel and a site of terror. Now it is a place for remembering, and the walls you see are the same walls through all of it.