Lieu d'Europe

About this audio guide

This guide to Lieu d'Europe in Strasbourg opens with Robert Ernst, the Nazi Oberburgermeister who ran occupied Strasbourg from this villa starting in 1941, rebuilding a wing of it and issuing orders until French and American troops fought through the surrounding park to liberate the city in November 1944. It follows what became of Ernst after he fled north, through nine and a half years in French custody and a Strasbourg courtroom in the 1950s that had to decide whether a German administrator counted as a traitor at all. Along the way it traces the villa's gentler chapters too, from the eighteenth-century bankers who built it as a country retreat to the newspaper publisher who renamed it, and the roughly forty American soldiers who bunked here one postwar summer.