Hitler's Alpine Lair to Become Resort

M U N I C H , Germany, July 2 -- Construction is beginning this month to transform the Eagle's Nest, Adolf Hitler's alpine command center, to a hotel and golf course.

The 140-bed luxury hotel will cost $60 million to build and will be on the same site as Nazi leaderHermann Goering's summer residence, reported German newspaper Welt am Sonntag on Sunday.

Kurt Faltlhauser, finance minister of Bavaria state, said he was aware that the leisure facilities near the Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden were in a historically sensitive area.

"It's a very sensitive place, but it's not a victims' place like Auschwitz, but a place where the perpetrators were, where the Nazi leaders built and celebrated while the rest of the world around them lay broken in pieces," Faltlhauser said.

An information center documenting the horrors of the Third Reich was installed at the nearby mountainside resort of Obersalzburg in 1999. It receives around 120,000 visitors annually.

No Nazi Tourism Allowed

The U.S. Interconti group, who will develop the site along with Bavarian state bank Bayerische Landesbank, have promised not to allow any "Nazi tourism" at the site, the newspaper said.

Bavarian state authorities finally succeeded in finding a private investor for the 260-acre site near the Austrian border in 1998.

Hitler is said to have planned Germany's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union from the retreat.

Allied bombers reduced Hitler's chalet, the Berghof, to rubble in the final days of World War II.

U.S. forces razed most of the remains in 1952 and used the surviving buildings and grounds as a leisure complex until they withdrew from the site in 1995.

Transformation Was Already in Progress

Each year hordes of neo-Nazis make a pilgrimage to the spot to mark Hitler's birthday on April 20, but Allied and German war veterans also visit Berchtesgaden.

The Eagle's Nest tea room, 6,000 feet high on the mountaintop, was built by the Nazi party as a present to Hitler on his 50th birthday in 1939.