Germany and Austria

BMW World HQ and museum

In each country we visited a different business to learn about leadership in a global setting.  One of the coolest business visits was the BMW factory and museum in Munich.

Before visiting BMW we went through a walking tour of Old Munich. The coolest thing in Munich was the Glockenspiel at the top of the town hall. The figures in the clock tower were life sized and commemorated the end of the black plague in Munich.  They said that during Medival times Munich had about 20,000 residents.  After the plague there were only 5,000. The clock and figures would go off twice a day but unfortunately we missed both times.

The food in Germany was awesome!  The food was also amazing in Italy and France but really each cuisine was its own kind of awesome.  We tried some spicy sausages, apple vinegar red cabbage, and pork knuckle. My father-in-law makes some traditional German dishes for Oktoberfest and he gets it awful close to authentic German food.
  

 We were in and out of Munich after visiting BMW and then off to Austria.  Our first stop was Salzburg where the "Sound of Music" was filmed. Its also the birth place of Mozart.

This is the fountain that the kids run around in the Sound of Music

This is the house where Mozart was born. He died a pauper and was dumped in a mass grave. To this day nobody knows where he's actually buried.

After a lighthearted visit to Salzburg we headed for a very somber visit at Matthausen concentration camp.  Matthausen was a work camp which sounds better than a death camp until you realize that the entire point of a work camp is to squeeze every last drop of work out of you before you die.

 Official records recognize that at least 100,000 prisoners died in Matthausen.  The "at least" is the scariest part. I heard that prisoner numbers were re-issued multiple times so it is impossible to get an accurate count of how many actually died there.

The long walkway through the prisoner barracks

Toward the end of the war the other camps were emptied and prisoners were relocated to Matthausen.  The barracks were overcrowded with hundreds of more prisoners than they were meant to hold.

This is the Stairs of Death. Prisoners had to carry 45 lb rocks from the quarry below.  Clearly they could have put in a rope and pulley system to get rocks to the top of the cliff but the camp Directors weren't concerned about efficiency or productivity - Matthausen was built to kill people.  You can even tell from the picture that the stairs are not level and are very steep.

This is one of the crematoriums.

This is a memorial to Polish prisoners murdered at Matthausen.  There about a dozen different memorials to different nationalities outside the prison walls.

 After Matthausen we went to Vienna.  Vienna was a very modern, cosmopolitan city.  This is St Steven's church which was built in the 12th century. St Steven's is right in the middle of downtown and up the street there's a McDonald's, a Tiffany's, and a lot of high end shopping.  Downtown Vienna is supposedly some of the most expensive real estate in all of Europe.

 The business that we visited in Vienna was Brodmann's Pianos.  They build high end pianos and speaker systems. The speakers that I'm standing next to cost $22,000 - EACH.

 In Vienna we got to visit several palaces.  This is the Belvedere. It was built by some Duke that defeated Napoleon and became a national hero.

The most amazing palace was Schönbrunn. It was the home of the Imperial Family which reigned from about 900 AD until the end of WWI.