Castle Frankenstein
Tuesday, 23rd August 2005 by Alex Turnbull
This is Castle Frankenstein near Darmstadt, Germany, where a notorious scientist named Konrad Dippel supposedly conducted experiments on human bodies... No wonder then, that some people believe Castle Frankenstein may have inspired Mary Shelly's literary masterpiece, 'Frankenstein'.
Thanks to Jens Kilian and Nikopol.
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
No comment to the castle, but…
If you look a few km to the west, you’ll find these strange circles in the wood: View Placemark Does anyone know what they are for? I guess they belong to the facility north of them, which seems to be some kind of barracks.
Even cooler than the strange circles in the wood that Al posted is the great loop of railroad track just to the west of them. That thing’s great!
(Ok, maybe that’s just the train-head in me coming out…)
afaik, they are part of an old oil storage facility (Fernleitungs-Betriebsges. mbH, Tanklager Pfungstadt) and the barracks are the “Bundeswehr Frankenstein-Kaserne, Darmstadt”
Danke, Bernd. I thought the circles were some kind of ammunition depot, or even an anti-aircraft site, maybe because of the near Frankenstein-Kaserne (cool name, btw). @Cory: There is also a track to the barracks. The track which goes south through leads to a bigger one.
Read the account of how Shelley conceived her novel at Wikipedia.
The circles you see are where US warplane bombs exploded during the war, I lived in the Kaserne for 9 months and got to know the area quite well. The area is rich in history.
The compound is now called “Major-Karl-Plagge-Kaserne” http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/saviors/german2/major-karl-plagge.4524.htm , formerly “Frankenstein-Kaserne”. As a matter of fact I used to serve there in 1992, with 1./SchwBrBtl850, an engineer batallion. German readers can read more about the structures in http://www.cold-war.de/sonstige-bunker/529-bunker-bei-darmstadt-eberstadt.html In short: they are the remains of a worldwar II era ammunitions factory
if you read the original post on that German forum, they are actually discussing an overgrown structure NORTH of the base … so nothing to do with the circles.
Look like some form of ammo dumps / storage to me …