Visiting LA and want to get some history and a workout. Try the Murphys Ranch Trail. Located in the Pacific Palisades, a very affluent area of LA.
The trail is approximately 4 miles and consists of over 500 stairs and walking through a Nazi Sympathizer camp. Yes, this trail is home to an abandoned nazi camp.
Winona and Norman Stephens started the center after a German named Herr Schmidt convinced them that Germany would win the war in the 1930s. He convinced them to create a self-sustaining camp so that when the germans took over the US, they would be able to help. This area was built as a haven until the war ended.
As we know, the Germans did not win the war, and the Stephens were arrested shortly after.
The ranch was fully stocked, minus the mansion that would have been built if they did not get arrested. It contains a power station, machine shed, and fully irrigated hillside to grow food: raised garden beds, a water tank, and diesel fuel storage.
The camp sits at the bottom of a hill. They even build over 500 cement stairs to get down to the compound. Once the war ended and the Stephens were arrested, the place fell apart. Some of the structures are still standing; all the stairs are intact, and the raised beds for a garden, the power station, water tank, barn, and a machine shed partially collapsed.
Looters and vandals have taken over and spray-painted all of the structures still standing.
It is an interesting story of how anyone could sympathize with the nazis after witnessing how many Jews they killed—estimated that 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust. I am a direct descendent of those who fled Russia during this horrible time.
So if you choose to visit Murphy Ranch as I have, see it as a piece of history, those of whom I will never understand, see it for what it is.
A place that never was.
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