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The row over Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest
Arson attack on mountainside retreat exposes difficulty in dealing with the physical legacy of Germany’s Nazi past
Adolf Hitler’s Alpine retreat has been burnt down in a suspected arson attack and German authorities now have a dilemma: rebuild it or not?
The Kehlsteinhaus, known in English as the Eagle’s Nest, perched 6,000ft up on an Alpine peak. It was built in 1938 to host – and impress – visiting dignitaries. Unlike the vast majority of Nazi monuments, it survived the war and its aftermath, and became a popular landmark and tourist spot – until last month, when an apparently deliberate blaze almost completely destroyed it.
‘Shrine for neo-Nazis’
The Eagle’s Nest was part of Obersalzberg, a Bavarian mountainside retreat that also included Hitler’s holiday home, the Berghof. After the Second World War, the Bavarian state government “wanted to raze Hitler’s favoured hideaway” but “local officials made the case to keep it going, at least in part”, said The Observer. The views are spectacular and there’s a “polished brass” lift to take you up there. “Tourism is tourism after all.”
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The Eagle’s Nest official website calls the building “an architectural masterpiece” but it must “not be forgotten” that it was “intended to overshadow all the horrors of those years” and the “inhuman dictatorship it served”.
Now, the fire has “reignited difficult questions regarding the future of the mountaintop site”, said Smithsonian Magazine. Debate is raging about “whether, and how, to rebuild at the toxic site for the next generation of visitors, while mitigating the never-quite-banished risk of creating a shrine for neo-Nazis”, said The Guardian. It’s a fraught question, “particularly given the resurgence of the far right in Germany and in Europe more broadly”.
‘A sensible solution’
Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, has pledged that the state will consult with historians, local authorities and preservationists to find a “sensible solution” that would “continue to do the work of remembrance”.
Keeping it open to the public would promote “transparency”, while keeping it fenced off would encourage “rumour and legends”, Sven Keller of the Obersalzberg Documentation Centre told The Guardian. And leaving the Eagle’s Nest as a ruin would only make it “even more fascinating” to unwanted pilgrims. “We should find ways to integrate” what remains after the fire with “new information and education”: “the fire added a new layer” to its history.
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Others, including Nazi-era historian Felix Bohr, oppose any rebuilding work at all. “Hitler’s megalomania should remain a ruin,” he told the paper. Our focus should be on “coming to terms with Nazi ideology, not restoring its stage sets”.
“For many, Germany has become a model for dealing with the legacies of dictatorship, war and genocide,” historian Gerald Steinacher, an expert on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, told The Christian Science Monitor. But, as this debate over the Eagle’s Nest shows, “how best to deal with Nazi buildings and sites remains an ongoing struggle”.
