Abtei Brauweiler

I had to take a day off because the daycare of my kid was closed today. Together we took the opportunity to visit a beautiful place for the first time by foot: The Brauweiler Abbey (German: Abtei Brauweiler). It is a former Benedictine monastery located at Brauweiler, now in Pulheim near Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, in Germany.

It was founded and endowed in 1024. The present abbey church, now the parish church of Saint Nicholas and Saint Medardus, is the third building on the site, built between 1136 and 1220 or later. The abbey was dissolved in the secularisation of 1803. The premises were subsequently used, under a Napoleonic law, as a hostel for beggars, and from 1815 under the Prussian regime as a workhouse.


From 1933 to 1945 the buildings were used for the internment, torture, and murder of political and social "undesirables" by the Gestapo and the civil authorities of the Nazi government. Prisoners included Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne and first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. From 1945 to 1949, it was an open camp for displaced persons administered first by the British Army and then by UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration).

The abbey buildings are now used by the Rheinisches Amt für Denkmalpflege ("Rhenish Department for the Care of Historic Monuments").

Despite it's bad history in the Nazi age of Germany it's now a great place to be. It's really pretty and it's park is a great place to have timeout from the busy life in my hometown Cologne. As every site of this historic relevance it features a bunch of #ingress portals which invite you to have some unique visits and some unique captures.



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