Sanatorium "High Pines"

This is a village of dreams for urbexers...my wife and I had been there in 2014 and had explored two sanatoriums, found out that one more had been torn down and didn't have time to visit another one.
Time to make up for this omission!
It was a late sunny summer afternoon and the village was on the way back to our "urbex homebase" in the middle of the Harz mountains.
Just like two years ago, we just parked at the street and walked past the gatehouse into a small patch of forest. After a few meters, we could see the old building almost lurking through the tall pines that seemed to swallow a lot of the afternoon sun...
Getting in was easy enough - the front door was open. Since the sun was low, the ground floor was so dark that we had to use our flashlights to be able to see properly, but what we saw was a promise of beautiful decay!
Advancing further up the stairs, we became more carful; the walls are getting really unstable, some of the even have partly collapsed already. The floors of the rooms are starting to collapse as well; it is only a matter of time until the entire building is going to break down into a pile of rubble.

We managed to reach the top floor and were able to get some nice photos on the way, but since it got darker, we decided to walk back down and head back to get some dinner.


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Hotel "Zoll"

In this case, the name and location can be openly said, since this place has been demolished in November 2016, about three months after my wife and I paid a short visit to this old hotel.
It was no priority spot for us, but it was conveniently on the way between two spots and we still had some time left.
The hotel was located at the western foothills of the Harz mountains in Germany, and we had taken a tour coming from the middle of the mountain range driving west. The hotel in Barbis in the German state of Niedersachsen was kind of the point where we turned around to drive back East towards the last location of the day.
There was a large parking place right next to the ruin of the hotel, so we just used that to park our car.
The hotel was surrounded by a construction fence that was none too secure, so we easily found our way in.
Time, vandals and various fires have taken a large toll on the old building. Hardly any furniture has been left untouched.
The only really interesting thing for me was that the kitchen had the exact same tiles that my parents used to have in our house when they built it in 1981.


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Rocket Fuel Factory S.

Yes, it's only the administration building, but that's about all that's left with the exception of a lot of remains in the forest behind the building, and we neither had the time nor the equipment to go for a thorough exploration of that.
But let's start from the top.
After we were finished at the grinding shop, we were on the way to our next stop which was going to be a little less urbex, but still interesting.
Shortly before we got there, there was an obviously abandoned building right by the side of the road. Since there was a parking spot right across, we decided to make a quick stop and check it out.
Getting in was easy enough. There was a gaping hole in the fence, and the building itself was wide open as well.
There were no clues to the former use of this building. Since we found it by accident, of course we hadn't been doing any research, so we were completely clueless.
The only hint that I found was a small sign that said "Sortie" - "Exit" in French, and there is only one probable reason for a building in the middle of Germany to have French writing on the walls - it must have been a French garrison!
With that in mind, we went back out and wanted to go back to our car, when another car pulled up. We naturally thought that we were caught. But no. Two guys got out and asked us what we were doing, and we told them. The bigger of the two guys immediately started talking about the entire area having been a top secret weapons factory. The he started talking about bunkers and tunnels in the mountains and started disappearing through high-grown stinging nettle and into the forest.
My wife and I were curious, and we followed him at a distance. After we had made our way through some massive thicket, and he had indeed found something that looked like the remains of a large bunker.
He then disappeared just as quickly because his friend wasn't as interested and was waiting in the burning sun for him to come back.
My wife and I decided that we weren't equipped for climbing through the entire area looking for tunnels, so we might come back for a more thorough investigation of the place - preferably a day that's not 35°C...
Anyway, after doing some research, I did indeed find out that the building we visited was the administration building of a factory that produced explosives and rocket fuel for the Nazi weapons program. After the war, it was in fact used by the French army, but information about the use are more than scarce.
It was a short, but adventurous explore.


To find out more about the history of this li'l ol' place and to check out all the photos from this spot, click the button below.