Ghosts Haunt Hohne

[5 July 2010] last updated 20 August 2012

To be 12 years old and to live as I did in Hohne, Germany, a former Wehrmacht Panzer Base, overlooking the site of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, is to live in a Petri dish, cultivating a fetish for the Second World War. It seems shameful to me that after almost seventy years of peace, this brief period of history should still spring to mind ahead of all other things when the word Germany is uttered. But as a young boy living where I did, one might forgive me for having a fixation with the Nazis and letting my imagination wander.

Hohne, Germany

The holocaust is somewhat drummed into us from an early age, so the history is known well enough not to require any background to this camp's existence. 

It goes without saying, that Hohne, has a fairly gruesome past. It was the death place of Anne Frank and over 50,000 others, whom the Third Reich had deemed unfit for Germany, and was once home to some of the very cruellest individuals of the last century. 

I do not believe in Ghosts, but this blog entry contains the my own personal contribution to the often risible canon of ghost stories from Bergen-Hohne. 

No matter how sceptical one might be toward the supernatural, the notion of living in such close proximity to a place of profound human suffering, is  undoubtedly an unpleasant one and certainly enough to get the imagination of a young boy fired.

Allow me to set the scene. Bergen-Hohne, in Northern Germany, is built on the edge a vast forest near to the historic market town of Celle. During my residence, the base belonged to the British military. Accommodation on the site consists of large buildings divided into apartments. The apartments were spacious and dark generally comprising of one very long corridor, with rooms branching off either side. These flats were once occupied by the Wehrmacht, but after they were expelled, the sick and dying from the adjacent concentration camp took up residence. 

On site, there is an enormous abandoned hospital where nobody ever goes; an obvious location for any malevolent spirits looking to take up residence. It remains one of the only buildings left in Germany with a Swastika above the front entrance, and can be found towards the back of the base, on the other side of a line of trees which separated it from the plot occupied by my apartment building; a tad too close for comfort.

Wehrmacht Hospital, now abandoned

Other points of interest include the Roundhouse. This building was once the German Officer’s Mess, where evening functions would be held. It too has Nazi effigies above its front door but the swastikas have since been obliterated. One of the cellars of the Roundhouse even remains unopened, due to the sensitivity of what lies within.

Tucked away within the furthest recesses of the camp, not far from the old hospital is a building with a very peculiar feature. This building once bore a Nazi eagle plaque of its own above the front door but, naturally, it has since been torn down. Now however, a mouldy smear in the shadowy shape an eagle remains, highly visible to passers-by. As you would expect, attempts have been made since the end of the war to scrub and paint over the garish blemish, but inexplicably, its gradual return can be guaranteed mere weeks after treatment has been applied. When I last saw it, it was vividly eldritch; as though the plaque had only just been removed.

Ghost stories aren’t hard to stumble upon in Hohne; there were a lot of bored, stay-at-home wives, alone while their husbands were off fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, who passed around the most absurd stories.

I heard tall tales of furniture levitating around the room, stories of families coming home to find all of the furniture had vanished completely, there was even one anecdote of a family that had run, shrieking, from their home, having seen a pair of Hassidic Jews standing in their hallway, staring sullenly into oblivion. There were some apartment buildings which were said to stand permanently vacant because families could only spent several weeks in them, before being frightened into leaving. It all seemed fairly ridiculous to me, even as a 12 year old boy.

My family's experiences, odd though they were, were subtler than the stories of flying coffee tables, told by some. 

Simply being left alone in the flat for an afternoon was enough to make your skin crawl. Perhaps it was the diabolical feng-shui of the apartment's layout, or the knowledge of who had lived there before me, but sitting by myself in our apartment never failed to fill me with a powerful sense of dread. I would end up curling up into a ball on my bedroom windowsill in unexplainable fear and wait motionless for hours for people to return.

My bedroom had a lot to yield to the budding horror junky. My lasting memory of that room, was of waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of my brother crying. We shared a room then (such was our sacrifice for a dining room) and through the darkness one night was audible his distressed sobs. He must have been 9 or 10 and I, 11 or 12. I called to him to ask him what was the matter. His reply to me was shaky; 

“I can feel someone touching my face," he whimpered, "its like a hand… like a rough hand.” 

I froze with terror. All of the hairs on my arms and neck stood up. Very stiffly, I reached out for the lamp and switched it on. To my relief, the light revealed no unsolicited, ghostly visitors. I reassured him that he was probably imagining it all, and although he didn’t seem at all comforted by my words, I turned the light off and went swiftly back to sleep. Half an hour later I was woken again in the same way. I inquired once more to my clearly distressed brother and was given much the same answer explanation. What could I do? There was no one else in the room, it had to be nightmares or hallucinations. This repeated itself several times until morning. How we largely forgot about this the next day, I do not know. It was a genuinely traumatic night for two young boys to endure.

There were other little instances which kept us on edge. Two of my Aunts once came to stay for a while. My brother and I were back at school in England, so our aunts used the room we had left vacant. One of my Aunts maintains that she experienced a very similar sensation to my brother, saying the covers of the bed had been pulled up around her neck as she settled into bed. Although she is Irish and therefore inherently prone to superstition; she was unaware of my brother’s experience and could not have corroborated hers with him.

On top of this, there was my brother's bizarre and unexplained monthly midnight vomiting sessions, bodiless footsteps were occasionally heard throughout the building, dead bats often had a habit of turning up on our bathroom windowsills and there was even a one off spontaneous light-bulb explosion whilst I was down in the cellar. All of it made for a fairly interesting tenure. 

If the Jewish mass graves and Albert Speer-esque architecture weren't enough, the seeming supernatural activity was more than enough to sap the joy from our home life.