He was here. In 1917, here at Rosenberg Fortress. Not as a visitor, but as a prisoner of war. Everybody forgot it; but he didn't. He reveals this fact in his memoirs: Charles de Gaulle.
Have a look at this fortress. No enemy has ever conquered it from the outside.
De Gaulle did it: from the inside.
He is born in Lille in 1890 and grows up in a conservative, intellectual family.
He takes up an officer career and takes part in the First World War as a captain. In 1917 in Douaumont (spoken: dwo´mo~) in the Battle of Verdun he is wounded and is captured by the Germans.
As he conducts himself well in the keenly guarded camp in Ingolstadt he is transferred into the officers' camp at Rosenberg Fortress in Kronach where Russians, Englishmen and also Frenchmen live.
And they live quite well, in any case better than in the trenches.
For the meals of an officer the town of Kronach has to pay 1,50 marks daily, for the boys serving them 60 pfennig. In the moats there are tennis courts and the gentlemen are allowed to take a walk around the fortress, if they promise and give their word of honour not to escape.
De Gaulle does not give this word of honour! He prepares his flight.
