France - Lorraine

Hackenberg Fortress

A Karen Brown Recommendation

The Maginot Line–Hackenberg: If you have time for just one fortification, we suggest Hackenberg Fortress near Veckring. Not only is it near Thionville and Metz, but it is also one of the largest and most important of the fortifications along the Maginot Line. Even Winston Churchill came to take a look at this underground city. Park your car and walk up to the entrance. Be sure to wear comfortable walking shoes and a warm coat, gloves, and a cap since you will be doing lots of walking and the underground tunnels are damp and cold. You will be greeted by a guide—some of the older ones have known the fortress first hand. Be forewarned that there might not be an English-speaking guide available. If not, join the tour anyway—most of what you see along the way will be self explanatory. The tour usually takes from 2 to 3 hours. As you start out on foot with your guide and descend ever deeper into the ground through a myriad of tunnels and elevators, it quickly becomes obvious why a guide is absolutely essential. In fact, you will probably hover near to him, like a school child clinging to his teacher, for fear of getting lost in the 10-kilometer maze of dark passages. Just about when you get tired of walking, a train will pull up through one of the long tunnels and you will hop aboard to continue your journey along the narrow gauge railway that was used to transport soldiers, ammunition, and supplies. Along the way you will make many stops where your guide will take you through a labyrinth of small tunnels and with his special key opens the heavy doors leading into locked rooms, flipping on lights so you can see. The tour is fascinating. Not a sophisticated, sleek Hollywood-style presentation, but rather a simple, well-presented one that shows you everything in homespun, heartfelt way that makes the adventure that much more real. One of the most interesting aspects of the tour is that along the way you will experience what it must have been like to have been one of the more than 1,000 enlisted men and officers who lived here. There are many dioramas which make the scene come alive. You will pass the kitchen where dressed manikins show the chef preparing dinner helped by the solders assigned to mess duty. The daily menu shows that the soldiers were well fed, no doubt an attempt to boost moral in this forsaken assignment. Another vignette is the dentist’s chambers where again full size models dressed in uniforms. A hospital, dormitories, officers’ quarters, laundry facilities, ammunition depots, huge maintenance rooms, a movie theater, recreation halls, power plants, and reservoirs of water are passed along the way. Housed in one of the barracks is a museum displaying memorabilia of the war with very interesting photographs of some of the soldiers and a display of weapons and uniforms At another point, a stop is made to see a demonstration of how the hidden gun turrets worked. As you watch, the guide operates the still perfectly-functioning mechanism whose gears slowly raise a camouflaged turret. You climb some steps leading outside where you watch as the gun turret magically rises from its hiding place below and pokes its head above the ground. (The fortress is open from April through October. Until mid-July, it is only open on weekends; however, additional weekday tours are added in the summer months. The first tour begins at 2pm and the last at 3:20 pm.)

Located along this Karen Brown Itinerary:

Maginot Line & Exploring Lorraine

Traveler Reviews:
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Nearby Hotels and Bed & Breakfasts:
Listed Alphabetically, Not By Distance.

• Romantik Hotel L’Horizon