Saigon, Palace of Reunification

There are images from youthful days that remain indelibly in memory. Among them are the helicopters over the American embassy, the panicked flight of Americans, and the capture of the Independence Palace, formerly the seat of the South Vietnamese president in Saigon. On April 30, 1975, the North Vietnamese troops entering the city with tanks broke down the fences of the palace and raised their flag.

What strikes us on our first trip to Vietnam in 1993 - as well as on the two subsequent trips in 2003 and 2023, and even now again - is that we have never heard any grief or accusations! Even the American Vietnam veterans, many of whom returned as tourists in 1993, were treated with exceptional respect. The Independence Palace has been renamed the Palace of Reunification and is now a museum. And even here, there are no accusations of possible ostentation, although it stands as a memorial to the painful history of ongoing wars from the end of World War II until 1975.

The halls are splendidly equipped for various occasions: reception, conference, and sleeping rooms for the South Vietnamese president, the First Lady, and the cabinet, command rooms with maps of the course of the war, a helicopter on constant standby, bunker rooms, and shooting ranges in the basement. While in 1993, mostly Germans were encountered alongside Americans in Vietnam, today the visitors come from many countries. We hear English, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Chinese, and still German - but above all, French. And Vietnamese!