Day 6Tuesday, September 15, 2026Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Across Germany to Munich
1944
Munich is where the party began, in beer halls and back rooms from 1919, and where it staged its failed putsch in November 1923. It called itself the Hauptstadt der Bewegung — the capital of the movement.
2026
The long haul east: Bastogne to Munich, most of a day on the autobahn. Everything up to here has been about a campaign. From tomorrow it is about what the campaign was fighting.
Roughly seven hundred kilometres and most of a day. There is not much to say about a transit day except that the itinerary needs one, and that this one sits at exactly the right place in the trip.
The hinge
Everything so far has been a campaign: objectives, ground, units, the mechanics of an army fighting its way across a continent. Beaches, foxholes, cemeteries, tanks. Hard, but legible — this is what soldiers do to each other.
The last three days are a different subject. Munich, Dachau, the Obersalzberg. Not how the war was fought but what was being fought, and what it was built on.
I suspect the drive is deliberately placed to give people a day in between. Several accounts of this tour say the same thing: do not schedule anything demanding for the evening you arrive in Munich.
Munich
The base for the rest of the trip. A wealthy, comfortable, extremely pleasant city that spent the 1920s and 1930s as the headquarters of the movement — the beer-hall meetings, the 1923 putsch that ended in gunfire on the Odeonsplatz, the Brown House, the party archives.
Postwar Munich rebuilt its old centre almost exactly as it had been, which produces the odd effect of a medieval-looking city that is largely younger than the people walking through it.
Getting the evening right
We arrive with time to spare and nothing scheduled. Marienplatz and the Hofbräuhaus are on tomorrow’s itinerary, so the sensible move is an early night before Dachau.
Where this was
This map repeats information already available as text. Every stop is listed in order on the timeline and in the journal index.
- Bastogne — departure
- Munich — three nights