Weird museums in Germany

The world's first Dachshund Museum opened in 2018 in the city of Passau. With more than 4,500 exhibits on display at the museum, it's safe to can say the collectors have a passion for the short-legged, often stubborn pooches. Dachshunds were long bred in Germany to hunt badgers.

What is one of the oldest transport containers known to mankind, still used everywhere today? The German Sack Museum in Nieheim has the answer in the form of 7,000 exhibits including grain and feed bags, vacuum cleaner bags, contemporary plastic bags, even air sickness bags, just to name a few. The above mail bag is probably the world's smallest — the pouch was mailed in 1930.

Today's toilet is yesterday's chamber pot. Avid collector Elisabeth Hesse has about 600 of the containers once used as urinals at night and kept underneath the bed. Many are made of glazed pottery, and they are on display at her small private museum in Wasbüttel in Lower Saxony. The oldest in her collection dates back to 1875. She found the pot in the above photo at a flea market in Berlin.

Another unique German museum is the Museum for Sepulchral Culture in Kassel, which is devoted to death, dying, mourning and burial traditions across centuries and the world. Exhibits include ornate hearses, coffins, urns, crosses, relics, jewelry and contemporary art and product design.

From whipping posts and gallows to knee screws and thumb screws (a vise to painfully crush thumbs or toes), guillotine, tongs, the rack and head presses, this museum in Rüdesheim on the Rhine has 144 instruments of torture on show. Drawings and etchings underline the cruelty of the Catholic Church's Inquisition and medieval punishment methods, which included burning witches at the stake.

Presumably most people have a corkscrew in a kitchen drawer. Bernhard Maurer bought his first corkscrew at a flea market in 1995 and has since collected more than 1,000 of the clever devices, from the most simple corkscrew to mechanical wine bottle openers. They are on show in an old barn at the Corkscrew Museum in the historic city center of Vogtsburg near the Black Forest in the southwest.

Located in Creglingen on the famed Romantic Road, a tourism road in southern Germany, the private Thimble Museum shows thimbles and sewing equipment from across the globe. Some are simple thimbles for daily use, others are valuable decorative thimbles. Thimbles to protect fingers from pinpricks while sewing have been around for millennia, even dating back to the age of mammoth hunters.

Solingen, a city in western Germany with a historic steelware industry, is home to the German Blade Museum. It presents the largest collection of historical silverware worldwide, from ancient spoons made out of bone to modern steak knives, and bladed weapons spanning the millennia from the Bronze Age to the 20th century.

Anyone curious about hops should head to the German Hop Museum. It gives visitors a taste of everything connected to one of the four basic ingredients need to make beer. It's no coincidence that the museum with its show of agricultural equipment, furniture, flatware, photos and coins is situated right in the heart of the Bavarian Hallertau, the world's largest hop-producing region.