Hitler's Mountaintop Retreat Now a Luxury Tourist Resort!

Adolf Hitler wrote most of "Mein Kampf" in a small rented house on a Bavarian mountainside known as Obersalzberg, overlooking the picture-postcard beautiful town of Berchtesgaden. When he became Germany's Chancellor in 1933, he bought the small rented house and much of Obersalzberg. His sprawling Berghof was built in stages from what was once the small rented house.

At the Berghof, Hitler hosted the likes of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini along with English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the Duke of Windsor. Also at the Berghof, Hitler plotted the European war and the extermination of the Jews.

In 1939, The Eagle's Nest, a chalet-type structure, was constructed on the mountaintop above the Berghof, and was presented to Hitler as a 50th birthday present. But the Fuehrer rarely visited Eagle's Nest because of his fear of heights. Other high-level Nazis, including Hermann Goering and Martin Bormann, built their own villas in or near Obersalzberg.

In 1945, only a few days before the end of the war with Germany, Obersalzberg was bombed by the Allies and Hitler's Berghof was badly damaged, only leaving a shell behind. In 1952, the shell was leveled.

Eagle's Nest and several of the villas were only slightly damaged. These structures were used as an American Army retreat until the troops left in 1996. Thanks to sponsorship of the German Free State of Bavaria, one of the Berghof's remaining visitors buildings was converted into a museum, the Dokumentation Obersalzberg, that has not only documented the Nazi history of the area, but also the part that Hitler's retreat played in plotting the Holocaust.

Supposedly to accommodate visitors to the museum, Bavaria had also sponsored a high-quality tourist hotel to be built on the site of Goering's villa and managed by the InterContinental hotel chain. In 2005, it was opened to the public.

Prominent members of Germany's Jewish community have supported the decision to build the luxury hotel as a positive step. To date, the Dokumentation Obersalzberg Museum has attracted 600,000 visitors, mostly Germans and Austrians.

The director of Munich's Institute for Contemporary History has said, "The best way to demystify places associated with the Nazis is to allow normal life to go on there."

Among those not pleased with the decision to build a luxury tourist resort on Obersalzberg have been Germany's Green Party and the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. They feel that the hotel will also attract neo-Nazis and their sympathizers.

Note that, in each of the InterContinental Hotel's suites, guests will find a 600-page book titled "Die Todliche Utopie" (In English: "Deadly Utopia"), a history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

As for Hitler's Eagle's Nest, it's now a popular restaurant.

SOURCES:

"Obersalzburg", Gary Warner, San Diego Union-Tribune, URL: (http://www.signonsandiego.com/
uniontrib/20061029/news_1t29ober.html)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/
20050302/HITLER02/TPTravel/TopStories

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TRAVEL/
DESTINATIONS/06/14/berchtesgaden.
burden.ap/index.html

"If you could see the place now", William Cook, Observer, URL: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2002/
nov/10/germany.observerescapesection)