Alsace-Moselle Memorial

Alsace-Moselle Memorial - darkometer rating : 2 - A super-modern memorial museum/multimedia "experience" located in the heart of the Alsace region of France . This region, together with parts of Germany across the present border, changed hands between the two countries several times over the last century and a half causing all sorts of associated hardships for the people. A main focus in the museum is on the period under Nazi German occupation/annexation between 1940 and 1945. > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations What there is to see: The building as such is one of the most remarkable aspects of this site: it's a flamboyant piece of ultra-modern architecture, the main feature of which includes a viewing platform with a monstrous, wedge-like "roof" jutting out horizontally into empty space for 20 metres – seemingly hovering over the valley below. At the bottom of the hillside, next to a pond that is home to some beaver-like river rats, stand a couple of reconstructed timber and earth barracks modelled on the ones deported POW s had to endure in the gulag of Tambov in the Soviet Union after WWII . These full-scale outdoor exhibits were constructed for a special additional exhibition about Tambov. This has long since finished, but the huts were left in place. When you've made your way up the hillside to the memorial museum as such and parted with your money for an admission ticket, you are handed an audio-guide … at least if you are a foreign visitor. If your French is up to it you could also opt for doing without the guide and make do with reading the panels/documents and listening to the audio-visual material within the exhibition, all of which are in French only (except of course for obvious WWII bits that are in German).