Cheiner Torfmoor, Germany —

Germany’s most peaceful landscape owes its existence to one of its most paranoid.

The Grünes Band — the Green Belt threading 860 miles along the former border between West Germany and communist East Germany — is now a sweep of orchids, wetlands and bird-rich moorland.

It began life as a fortified no-man’s land, wired with mines and patrolled day and night to keep citizens in the East from escaping.

Walk it today, and the Cold War feels impossibly far away. There’s birdsong, frogs and a boardwalk over the Cheiner Torfmoor’s marsh orchids.

But the quiet is only possible because people were once forced to stay out.

Today, in the northern regions of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, roughly between Hamburg and Berlin, the Cheiner Torfmoor, or Cheiner Heath, is

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