The Lost Village of Döllersheim in Döllersheim, Austria

Atlas Obscura tells the story of Döllersheim, an Austrian village first recorded in eleven forty-three that was wiped off the map when the Nazi regime seized around twenty thousand hectares of the Waldviertel for a military training area. According to the same account, more than forty towns were expropriated and over six thousand eight hundred people were displaced between nineteen thirty-eight and nineteen forty-one, and the choice of that particular land was ordered by Adolf Hitler personally. Many have long suspected he wanted to erase his family's home region, where his father Alois was born out of wedlock and questions about Hitler's own ancestry lingered. Today the site holds memorials to the lost homeland and to the victims of war, and the former village church survives, rededicated and restored as a Peace Church.

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