On dark days in Germany’s Rhineland the fog boils off the cold, black lake waters of the Urftstausee, rolls upward to shroud in Wagnerian vagueness and grandeur a vast modern castle of reinforced concrete and brownstone that clings to the mountainside above. The castle is Ordensburg-Vogelsang, one of several such “Fortresses of the New Order” built in the 1930s. There, in well-equipped classrooms, comfortable dormitories, a “Tower of Wisdom” in which Hitler once planned to enshrine a sequel to Mein Kampf, the Nazi elite trained the future rulers of Germany and, they hoped, of the world.
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