Why am I doing this?

My name is Elias. I am a 36-year-old hobby historian, drawn to the physical traces of the past. I look at buildings, reliefs and memorials not through any political lens, but as historical objects — material evidence that helps us understand what happened and how it shaped the world we live in today.

As a child, I grew up near the Belgian coast and was already fascinated by the Atlantik Wall bunkers on the beaches. Later, I grew increasingly interested in the traces that remain of civil life under the dark NS-state in Germany. I began researching this on my own, through both specialist publications and 1930s sources, to find architecture, art, memorials and other things that are hard to find anywhere else. Over the years, I have built up knowledge of many, many little-known locations across Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechia and Belgium.