Nordhausen is a town of some forty-four thousand people on the southern edge of the Harz, the biggest place for a wide area, and it carries a heavy history that deserves a pause. In the last years of the Second World War the Nazis built a huge underground factory in the nearby Kohnstein hill, where V-2 rockets were assembled by prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora camp, and thousands died of hunger, disease and brutality. The Dora memorial and museum at the site is a serious, sober place, open to the public. In April 1945 the town itself was destroyed in air raids, and most of the old centre was lost.
Today Nordhausen has a modern town centre, a handful of surviving old buildings, and a long tradition of distilling grain spirit, with the Nordhäuser Korn sold across Germany. It makes a good place to fill up and eat before heading into the hills. To the south, the Kyffhäuser, a low wooded ridge rising above the plain of the Goldene Aue, is the destination for the hairpin ride: a road with bends and gradients unusual for this part of Germany, climbing to a massive stone monument to Emperor Wilhelm I with the legend of the sleeping Barbarossa beneath. According to the story, the red-bearded emperor sleeps within the mountain, and will return when the ravens stop circling.
The country around is known as the Südharz, with gypsum karst landscapes, sinkholes, clear springs and beech woods, and a gentle, rolling character. Roads are generally good, curving over wooded hills and through village streets, and the Kyffhäuser section is the real highlight, though it is short. The traffic is mild except in the town itself, and weekend bikers from Thuringia and Lower Saxony make the hills busy on dry days.
Practically, use Nordhausen or one of the small towns for fuel and bring a layer in spring and autumn, when the hills are cooler than the plain. There is a tram network in the town, with rails to watch for in the wet. Summers are warm and sometimes humid, and thunderstorms form over the Harz in the afternoon. Autumn light on the beechwoods is good.