IN NOVEMBER, 1938, the British magazine Homes & Gardens featured an article detailing the delights of Hitler’s holiday chalet on the Obersalzberg, just above the Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden. “The site commands the fairest view in all Europe,” gushed the starry-eyed author and photographer Ignatius Phayre, who noted, “The curtains are of printed linen, or fine damask in the softer shades. The Führer is his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well as architect.” The article goes on to describe the “delightful” and “lovely” daily routine maintained by Hitler on the Obersalzberg. Given the many accounts in the local and international press of Nazi violence during the first five years of the Hitler dictatorship, no one could legitimately have claimed, as the peaceful images of the Berghof suggest, that the Nazi regime would become a pacific force in Europe.  That Homes & Gardens made the choice to fawn over Hitler and his chalet so conspicuously thus inevitably seems incredible, immoral, and ridiculous. In fact, the kinds of photographs that accompany the article were an important part of the Nazi propaganda machine, because the idealization of the Obersalzberg became a linchpin in the Nazi plan to rationalize the war—that if we only struggled through we would finally all bask in the best of German folk culture. Thus, “Frauen Goebbels and Göring,” Phayre tells us, “in dainty Bavarian dress, arrange dances and folk songs.” The Homes & Gardens essay paints the Obersalzberg as a folksy mountain trading on Bavarian nostalgia and Nazi kitsch, a portrait that both willfully ignores the violence that had always been an inherent part of the Nazi regime and allows the regime to oppose the “danger” of the cosmopolitan (and Jewish) city with the supposed “simplicity” of mountain folk life. The Obersalzberg is a site of beauty that lies at the heart of the Hitler cult.

In March, 1941—in the middle of the war and after evidence of genocide had been circulated—C. Brooks Peters wrote an uncannily similar article for The New York Times. Like Phayre, Peters praises the landscape of the Obersalzberg and notices the care taken with the décor of the Berghof; like Phayre, Peters makes no mention of Nazi violence. The idealized image of the Obersalzberg represented in these British and American articles from the popular press, along with the evocation of quaint Bavarian folk dress for the wives of high-ranking Nazi officers who commissioned unprecedented acts of violence, encapsulates perfectly the aestheticizing mechanism of the Nazi enterprise. The elegance of the Nazi holiday complex in the Alps offered a powerful counter-image to Nazi genocide and other Nazi atrocities. But the Obersalzberg was not merely a holiday retreat; it was also the place from which military and other key decisions were made. To cite only two examples (among many), a meeting at the Berghof with Chamberlain paved the way for the Munich agreement that in turn led to World War II, and a gathering of the leaders of the armed forces on 22 August 1939 produced plans for the invasion of Poland. Thus, while the Holocaust was not planned on the Obersalzberg, key military decisions were hatched in the beautiful landscape of the Bavarian Alps. I argue that the diverse depictions of the Obersalzberg in the popular press, literature, and souvenir albums represent an aspect of what Walter Benjamin has termed the Nazi “aesthetization of politics,” one that, unlike the spectacular nature of Nazi party rallies defined so well by Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, attempts to mask—and therefore ultimately justify—the violence of the Nazi regime.

In what follows I first introduce the Obersalzberg complex and then discuss how an early twenty-first century German novel, Sybille Knauss’s Eva’s Cousin, explores complicity and gender in the context of the elegant world of the Nazi elite on the Obersalzberg. I then analyze souvenir photograph albums of the Obersalzberg that were most likely purchased by G.I.s at the end of the war and brought back to America to linger in musty closets until being donated to libraries —albums whose photographs could have been used as illustrations for Knauss’s novel. By way of conclusion I discuss an arresting image of the photographer Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub. Ultimately, I hope that we can learn from the uses of the Obersalzberg cautionary lessons about the mechanisms of power, projection, and propaganda.

The Obersalzberg, 1923-2006

The Obersalzberg once hosted a tiny village above the Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden, Germany, about fifteen miles from Salzburg, Austria. Hitler began frequenting the area in 1923 and in 1933 bought a house there, which, after renovations, became his holiday villa, the Berghof, in 1936-37. Architect and Armaments Minister Albert Speer, Reichsmarschall and Luftwaffe head Hermann Göring, Hitler’s powerful secretary Martin Bormann, and other high-ranking Nazis also built or renovated holiday homes near the Berghof. By the height of the war the Nazi complex on the mountain could house in various barracks, hotels, and other accommodations 10,000 people, including Hitler Youth, 3,500 construction workers, and many visitors. Especially during the early years of the Third Reich, Hitler spent a great deal of time (sometimes as much as six months a year) at the Berghof; consequently, the villa became a popular pilgrimage spot for the thousands of avid Nazi supporters who flocked there in the hope of catching sight of or possibly even touching the Führer. Many propaganda images that were widely circulated during the Third Reich were taken on the Obersalzberg.  In 1937, due to Bormann’s fears for Hitler’s safety, the area was secured by a huge security fence and was then dubbed the Führergebiet; these security measures circumscribed but did not deter the eager pilgrims. In 1937-38 Bormann built the “Eagle’s Nest” mountain teahouse, which still stands as a tourist attraction today. Hitler entertained (and often intimidated) many important global dignitaries and statesmen on the Obersalzberg, including British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Hungarian leader Admiral Nicholas Horthy, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the French Ambassador André François-Poncet, and Italian dictator Mussolini. In 1943 Hitler ordered the construction of a vast and exceedingly well-stocked bunker system blasted into the mountain below the Nazi complex. On 25 April 1945 the Allies bombed the Berghof and other sites on the Obersalzberg, and shortly after (on May 4) SS troops filled the Berghof with petrol and ignited it. (See Lee Miller’s stunning photograph of a G.I. watching the Berghof burn.) On 30 April 1952, the seven-year anniversary of Hitler’s suicide, the Bavarian government razed the remaining Nazi buildings in the complex (with the exception of the Eagle’s Nest and the Hotel zum Türken), because the Berghof ruins had become an active neo-Nazi pilgrimage site. From shortly after the end of the war until 1996 the U.S. army also maintained an army recreation center at the formerly ritzy Hotel Platterhof, now called the Hotel General Walker. In 1996, the recreation center was returned to the Bavarian government, which leveled the Hotel General Walker in 1999-2000 and then opened a Documentation Center. In March, 2005, on the spot where Göring’s lavish house once stood, and a two-minute walk from the site of the Berghof, a five-star Hotel InterContinental opened to some short-lived controversy.

The Obersalzberg is almost always characterized, in the words of an American soldier in Band of Brothers (a film which details the 101st airborne division’s victorious arrival at the Eagle’s Nest), as the “Nazi’s spiritual home.” This characterization stems from several factors: first, Hitler’s attraction to the area was heightened by the proximity of the Untersberg, a mountain which, as the brothers Grimm document, is legendary for its association with mighty but sleeping kings whose awakening will herald an Armageddon that will in turn usher in a new Golden Era. Hitler, who was intensely attracted to German legends, saw himself as such a king and made sure that the famous panoramic window of the Berghof faced the Untersberg. Second, because the area was fenced off after 1937 and was thus only accessible to important Nazis and their guests, the Nazi complex itself took on a mysterious, mythical quality; the contemporary press was full of comments about the mysteries of the Führer’s activities on the mountain, and the Allies believed that Hitler was building a vast “Alpine Fortress” at which he intended to make his last stand. Third, the Obersalzberg was the place where, from 1936 onwards, Eva Braun, Hitler’s supposedly secret mistress, primarily lived; the rumors circulating around Braun contributed to the mythical quality of the mountain and are extensively explored in Knauss’s novel.