*THIRD Reich propaganda minister Josef Goebbels was born in Monchengladbach and no doubt often talked-up the place when need be.

Of course, there wasn’t a big football stadium there in those days, but it’s still a pleasant, if unremarkable German town.

Richard Jeals is one of my fellow passengers on the coach and he also has a tale to tell about highranking Nazis. For his father – a soldier in the Black Watch – helped to detain Heinrich Himmler, sadistic head of the Waffen SS, during the closing days of the war in May, 1945.

Apparently, the swivel-eyed psychopath was trying to sneak through the British lines in disguise, wearing an eye-patch for good measure.

But Richard’s father asked to look under the patch… and discovered there was nothing wrong with the brutal Nazi’s eye.

The game was up.

For you Himmler, the war was over… *THE site of the wartime labour camp at Nordhausen is utterly depressing even after the passage of so many years.

Here, in the maze of underground tunnels, prisoners were worked to death.

Assembling the dreaded V2 rockets, they laboured for 12 hours a day and then slept – if they could in the constant noise and fumes – within the same tunnels.

The thousands who died of malnutrition and exhaustion were then cremated. This was hell on earth.

I wondered whether any of the SS guards ever went home to their families in the evening and felt any guilt. Probably not – you need to possess human emotions for that to happen and these monsters were certainly lacking in that department.

*HOWEVER, Belsen concentration camp is by far the worst experience. The sheer numbers of murdered people overwhelm the visitor, defying comprehension.

Scattered grey marker stones mark the thousands of dead. But the saddest sight is Anne Frank’s gravestone.

She died here not long before the Allies liberated this foul place in 1945.

Anne was on the brink of life, a 16-year-old with hopes for the future. As she lay concealed with her family in that Amsterdam attic, she had dreamt of being a writer.

The Nazis killed her. Yet her diary would eventually go on to become a world best-seller… a symbol of the ultimate power of good over profound evil.