A WWII Tour of Munich

The first in a series of virtual tours for my summer class

Spring classes are finally done at Bethel University. But I still have one course to teach before beginning my fall sabbatical: a summer course on World War II that starts June 19th.

It’s a class I’ve taught in person many times before, but never online. So in addition to recording lectures, assigning readings and essays, and giving quizzes and exams, I’m going to borrow a trick from the online World War I course I’ve taught the last two summers and give students several opportunities to engage in a kind of virtual travel.

The Munich plaza dedicated to the memory of victims of National Socialism - CC BY-SA 4.0 (Chris Gehrz)

My students will choose five days throughout the summer to skip their lecture quiz and instead spend half an hour visiting some kind of site related to the lecture topic (then writing a short response). Here’s my tentative list of site options from which they can choose:

Museums: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Oświęcim, Poland); Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (Hiroshima, Japan); Imperial War Museum (London, England); Museum of the Great Patriotic War (Moscow, Russia); National Museum of the U.S. Air Force (Dayton, OH); National WWI Museum (Kansas City, MO); National WWII Museum (New Orleans, LA); Truman Presidential Library and Museum (Independence, MO); and Yad Vashem (Jerusalem, Israel).

Memorials and Cemeteries: Normandy American Cemetery (Colleville-sur-Mer, France); North Africa American Cemetery (Carthage, Tunisia); Pearl Harbor National Memorial (Honolulu, HI); Sicily-Rome American Cemetery (Nettuno, Italy); Yasukuni Shrine (Tokyo, Japan); plus one special option on the last day of the course, when students can visit any local WWII memorial near them.

Websites: the WWI, Interwar, and WWII pages that I wrote in 2014-15 for the Bethel at War digital project; and the “On the Homefront” page from the National Park Service.

Walking Tours: finally, I’m going to reprise a feature of the WWI online class and record virtual “walking tours” of WWII sites and memorials in five European cities.

It’s a way that I’ve tried to honor my experience in the 2010s, when I got to co-teach world wars history via three-week travel courses in Europe.¹ Each virtual tour uses a digital tool called StoryMap, in which I can embed 5-minute videos at each of six or seven spots along a 1-2 mile walk. Here’s one of the videos I recorded for our first city: Munich, Germany, the birthplace of National Socialism.

As we go through the summer, I’ll periodically use Substack to share overviews of the remaining four tours. As a special bonus for paid subscribers, I’ll share the link to the actual tour behind the paywall, starting with the one for Munich (which I recorded last week).