[Bartje]

Martino ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/martino_ ) and myselve went away to enjoy a good weekend with sun, beer, bbq and great locations.
We both took our tents, so we spent the night at a camping 2 nights.

One of the locations we want to see was Villa Viktoriastift.

Heinrich Lieser, son of a poor laborer en born in 1981 earned his money as a iron goods dealer.
After earning a fortune he bought a large piece of property and builded Villa Viktoriastift.
It contains the big villa, a administration office, a large shed and a slaughterhouse.
The wealth only took until 1926, that year Heinrich went bankrupt.
The buildings were sold to a childrens hospital.There was place for 80 beds en outside playgrounds were build.
Especially children from the area Koblenz stayed here, mostly for a period of 2 weeks.
In 1933 the hospital closed the doors again, and in 1934 it became a recovery place for children of railroad employees.
The capacity increased to 120 beds.
In the same period it became a home for soldiers who returned of the front and had to recover.
In 1943 there was a new change and it became a school.
Young boys learned all about farming and livestock.
The villa itselve was in use as an elderly home in this period.

The school closed in 1957 because it was not longer profitable.
After a scandal the elderly home closed in 1971.
The attendants maltreated and molested the elderly people, but the official reason was that the cost of modernisation were too high, so that keeping the buildings was too expensive.

In 2009 the buildings are abandoned and decayed en nothing reminds of the rich history or the people who once lived here.


Bart
www.urban-travel.org

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