When the victorious Americans took their photographs, framed in the vast viewing space, the mountain shone dazzling light onto a burnt-out husk. #Wanderer above the sea of fog meaning codeBefore the vast window, he would lay out his maps and stare at the Untersberg, inside which, competing legends have it, the medieval conquerors Charlemagne and Barbarossa lie in slumber (the latter providing the code name for Hitler’s catastrophic invasion of the Soviet Union). It was, however, at the Berghof, which he’d bought and developed with proceeds from Mein Kampf, that he spent most time. He worried, too, about the possibility of lightning strikes. An expensive birthday gift dreamt up by the sycophantic Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, Hitler feared hypoxia at high altitude, the dangerous curves in the road and the claustrophobic elevator trip through the mountain to reach it. He was much less keen on the Kehlsteinhaus, the so-called ‘Eagle’s Nest’ located on a high mountain peak. Hitler was fond of the nearby Mooslahnerkopf tea house and enjoyed regular walks to it, with the spectacular views of the mountains and forests on the route and at the adjacent overlook. The place was still geared to the simple activities of a former weekend cottage, merely expanded to vast proportions. On the other hand, these very clumsinesses gave the Berghof a strongly personal note. All in all, this was a ground plan that would have been graded D by any professor at an institute of technology. However, Hitler had been inspired to situate his garage underneath this window when the wind was unfavourable, a strong smell of gasoline penetrated into the living room. It offered a view of the Untersberg, Berchtesgaden, and Salzburg. The retreat’s most striking feature, however, was a colossal 344 square foot panoramic view of the mountains, which Hitler’s leading architect and Armaments Minister Albert Speer recalled disapprovingly in Inside the Third Reich:Ī huge picture window in the living room, famous for its size and the fact that it could be lowered, was Hitler’s pride. Paintings adorning the walls were traditional from Italian Renaissance to German Romanticism, including, at one stage it is said, Böcklin’s foreboding Isle of the Dead. Given that Hitler spent much of the war here, there was a globe, a marble table for meetings and a Gobelin tapestry that concealed a cinema screen. There were busts of the composer Richard Wagner and Hitler’s mentor, the morphine-addicted playwright Dietrich Eckart. Earlier photographs of the Great Hall show an uneasy mix of the rustic and opulent. Allied bombing had obliterated much of the site, before SS guards ignited what was left. By the time US soldiers arrived at the Berghof in May 1945, Hitler’s alpine retreat had already been gutted.
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