Europe Euphoria

Obersalzberg is a small rented house on a Bavarian mountainside. It’s a place where Adolf Hitler wrote most of Mein Kampf. It has been converted into a luxury resort. Obersalzberg was bombed by the Allies in 1945, a few days before the end of the war. Hitler’s Berghof, a place where Hilter hosted the likes of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini along with English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the Duke of Windsor was damaged and only a shell was left behind. This shell was leveled in 1952. Dokumentation Obersalzberg, is one of the remaining visitors buildings that was converted into a museum. This museum has documented the Nazi history of the area and the part that Hitler’s retreat played in plotting the Holocaust. 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. The decision of building the luxury hotel was supported as a positive step by the prominent members of Germany’s Jewish community. Till date, Dokumentation Obersalzberg Museum has attracted 600,000 visitors, mostly Germans and Austrians. Germany’s Green Party and the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center are among those not pleased with the decision to build a luxury tourist resort on Obersalzberg. They feel that the hotel will also attract neo-Nazis and their sympathizers. It’s an InterContinental Hotel with suites where guests will find a 600-page book titled Die Todliche Utopie (Deadly Utopia), a history of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Making Hitler’s mountaintop retreat, a luxury tourist resort and allowing normal life to go to these places associated with the Nazis is a best way to demystify these places.