Berghof (Obersalzberg)

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Above the Berghof , in the foreground the main entrance

The Berghof in Obersalzberg was a country house and from 1936 at the latest the private residence of Adolf Hitler .

It was built in 1916 as Landhaus Wachenfeld for a north German merchant. From 1928, Hitler's country house was a rented holiday home. After taking power in 1933, he bought it and had it gradually expanded, initially by the architect Alois Degano and then by Roderich Fick, into the Berghof, his prestigious residence.

It then formed the core of the Obersalzberg Führer's restricted area , which with the construction of the " Small Reich Chancellery " in 1937 and Reichenhall-Berchtesgaden Airport as the second seat of government became a central place of power in the National Socialist German Reich . In total, Hitler spent about a third of his reign at the Berghof, that is almost four years in total. International diplomats and politicians came to the Berghof for negotiations.

The building was badly damaged by Allied air raids shortly before the end of the war. In 1952, the Free State of Bavaria had the building blown up. The Obersalzberg documentation, located not far from the former Berghof grounds , particularly establishes the connection between local and overall Nazi contemporary history.

history

Wachenfeld House

Hitler in the Wachenfeld house, 1936

The later Berghof was built in 1916 for the Kommerzialrat Winter from Buxtehude as Landhaus Wachenfeld. At that time, numerous well-known personalities such as the piano manufacturer family Bechstein had vacation homes in Obersalzberg .

In 1923 Hitler was in Obersalzberg for the first time. This was followed by further stays.
→ see main article: Führersperrgebiet Obersalzberg, section history

From October 1928 Hitler rented the Haus Wachenfeld country house , which was owned by the leather manufacturer and early motorist Margarete Winter , née Wachenfeld.

Berghof

Margarete Winter-Wachenfeld had already made Hitler a notarized sale offer on September 17, 1932 , which he only accepted after he took power in June 1933 and renamed the country house "Berghof" after his purchase. Hitler's half-sister Angela Raubal ran the household. Party officials such as Hermann Göring , Albert Speer and Martin Bormann moved into second homes in Obersalzberg.

At first the house was only secured with a fence. The presence of the new Chancellor in the small mountain village, however, attracted many supporters. According to his own plans, Hitler commissioned the architect Alois Degano in 1933 to carry out the first relatively minor renovation of the Wachenfeld building, and the architect Roderich Fick for the more complex renovation from 1936 onwards . To increase the security of the dictator, the entire area in his new “adopted home” was cordoned off, declared a “ Führer's restricted area ” and guarded. Access was only possible with an authorization card. Hitler received groups from the HJ , the BDM and other organizations and presented himself as “Chancellor of the People” against the idyllic mountain backdrop. In the Führer cult of Nazi propaganda , he presented himself as "Hitler apart from everyday life" and "Hitler as nobody knows him". Numerous corresponding photo albums and illustrated books appeared.

After the major renovation

Great hall of the Berghof, 1936
Panorama window with a view of the Kneifelspitze , in the background the cloud-shrouded Untersberg

After the renovation, Hitler had a representative house that he used to receive diplomats and celebrities. An important element of his representation were the paintings, which he hung up personally and which he liked to show his guests. With them, the former painter presented himself as an artist and “ingenious collector” in the succession of Adolf Friedrich von Schack and Friedrich II of Prussia . Another famous representational element of the house was the 8 meter by 4 meter large, electrically retractable panorama window in the large hall. In the pre-war period he was visited by Prince Regent Paul of Yugoslavia , Count Ciano (Mussolini's son-in-law) and Aga Khan III.

In 1937 Hitler received the Duke of Windsor after his abdication as King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, together with his wife Wallis Simpson . Apparently the ex-king wanted to offer himself as a representative for an international peace initiative based on Hitler's ideas.

Chamberlain am Berghof, 1938

On February 12, 1938, Austria's Federal Chancellor Schuschnigg and State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Guido Schmidt signed the Berchtesgaden Agreement under massive pressure . On September 15, 1938, during the Sudeten Crisis , British Prime Minister Chamberlain was at the Berghof for negotiations. On January 5, 1939, Hitler met the Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck . On August 20, 1939, he telegraphed Stalin and submitted the non-aggression pact to him . The Ustasha leader Ante Pavelić was on a state visit on June 6, 1941 at the Berghof.

Many domestic political decisions were also made at the Berghof. For example, on August 22, 1939, Hitler gave a speech to the commanders-in-chief of the Wehrmacht  - later also called the " Genghis Khan speech " - in which he announced the attack on Poland . When Henriette von Schirach approached Hitler about the deportations of Jews during a visit in 1943 , according to contemporary witnesses she was no longer invited to the Berghof. After the suppression of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto , Himmler came to a meeting on June 19, 1943, at which it was decided to convert ghettos into concentration camps and to murder those unable to work ( Cottbus company ).

Hitler was often at the Berghof, mostly for long periods of time. Bormann, gray eminence at the Berghof, therefore created the “Führer-Sperrgebiet” with a comprehensive infrastructure. A little away from the Berghof, in Bischofswiesen near Berchtesgaden, he had the Reich Chancellery Berchtesgaden , also known as the “Small Reich Chancellery”, built. The Reichenhall-Berchtesgaden government airport was built in Ainring near Freilassing .

(→ Obersalzberg at the time of National Socialism )

staff

Herbert Döhring was part of the permanent staff of the Berghof as property manager. The three chambermaids at the Berghof were Anna Plaim , Elfriede König and Resi Stangassinger. Other people at the Berghof included Johanna Wolf , Gerda Christian , Otto G possibly , Hans Baur , Heinrich Heim , Rochus Misch and his personal physician Theo Morell .

Nazi propaganda

Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun at the Berghof, 1942

Photo shoot for the Nazi propaganda created Heinrich Hoffmann . The numerous color photos that Hitler's cameraman Walter Frentz took since 1940 were not published during the National Socialist era . Numerous propaganda postcards showed Hitler's summer residence and its surroundings. The large hall's retractable panoramic window was well known. Hoffmann also created colored photo postcards of the “Führer’s study”. The personality cult around the “Führer”, who ruled the people down from his mountain, could be staged particularly well in the grandiose alpine panorama between Watzmann and Königssee . The Alpine idyll was in clear contrast to the rest of the empire, which was still marked by the First World War . Like a monarch close to the people, Hitler lived here with Eva Braun and a kind of court of servants. The dictator who built extermination camps presented himself here as a family man and nature lover .

End of war

US soldiers visit the destroyed buildings
The destroyed Berghof, taken between 1947 and 1949

Between January and June 1944, the Berghof and the surrounding “Führer-Sperrgebiet” were formally used as the Führer headquarters . On July 14, 1944, around a month after the Allies landed in Normandy (→ Operation Overlord ), Hitler left the Berghof for good and returned to the Fuehrer's headquarters in Wolfsschanze .

The area of ​​the Führer's restricted area in Obersalzberg had been spared air strikes for a long time. On April 25, 1945, five days before Hitler's suicide, four-engine bombers belonging to the British RAF Bomber Command targeted the Berghof and its surroundings. After the air raid, the Berghof itself was only damaged. On May 4, 1945, the 101st US Airborne Division, the 3rd US Infantry Division and the 2nd French Armored Division occupied Berchtesgaden without a fight. The occupation of Obersalzberg was so prestigious that American and French units fought against each other. Before the victorious forces moved in, SS men set the damaged Berghof on fire, and the population also looted the building. According to Guido Knopp , in May 1945 a team from the US military intelligence service CIC u. a. Hitler's sister Paula Hitler , who was hiding near the Berghof, also temporarily in custody.

The theft of art under National Socialism was thematized in the Nuremberg trials with pieces of evidence (such as photo albums for the paintings) that US soldiers had confiscated from the Berghof, among other places. Hitler's book collection and other private items that had been preserved were confiscated.

After successful negotiations between the Americans and the Free State of Bavaria, part of the Obersalzberg, which also included the Berghof ruins, was returned to the Free State of Bavaria in 1951 on condition that the ruins of the Berghof and the Göring House were razed to the ground . On April 30, 1952, exactly seven years after Hitler's suicide in Berlin, he had the ruins of the Berghof blown up and the area reforested.

present

Notice board on the Berghof site

After the Americans had completely handed the Obersalzberg over to the Free State of Bavaria in 1996, the latter commissioned the construction of a permanent exhibition. The Obersalzberg documentation , as a “place of learning and remembrance” not far from the Berghof property, which is scientifically managed by the Institute for Contemporary History , was opened in 1999. In 2008, the institute erected a notice board on the site of the former Berghof to complement it.

reception

Walter Krüttner's short documentary film It must be a piece of Hitler deals with the hunt of tourists from all over the world for original Hitler devotional objects at the Berghof in the early 1960s and the satisfaction of local demand.

literature

  • Ulrich Chaussy : Neighbor Hitler. The cult of the Führer and the destruction of homes on the Obersalzberg. With current photos by Christoph Püschner. Links, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-86153-100-3 .
  • Hendrik van Capelle & AP van de Bovenkamp: The Berghof, Adlerhorst - Hitler's hidden center of power. Tosa, Vienna 2007, ISBN 978-3-85003-121-9 .

Web links

Commons : Berghof  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Second seat of government of the Third Reich and place of propaganda ( Memento of 26 August 2015, Internet Archive ), online at obersalzberg.de
  2. ↑ a b NS-Residenz Obersalzberg: Der Höhenwahn , online at einestages.spiegel.de
  3. ^ Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin: The Obersalzberg as a place of contemporary history. , online at obersalzberg.de
  4. ↑ Photos of the Speer, Bormann and Göring houses , online at thirdreichruins.com
  5. ↑ Documentation Obersalzberg - Award: Open two-phase realization competition with ideas section ( Memento from December 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Staatliches Bauamt Traunstein (PDF file with 55 pages), see p. 28, online at stbats.bayern.de
  6. ^ Obersalzberg 1933 - 1945 - Second seat of government of the Third Reich and site of propaganda , online at obersalzberg.de .
  7. ↑ The Berghof as a place of art , in: Birgit Schwarz: Geniewahn: Hitler und die Kunst , Vienna 2009, p. 155ff.
  8. ↑ The Berghof - Adlerhorst - Hitler's hidden power center , Hendrik van Capelle, AP van de Bovenkamp, ​​Vienna 2003, p. 102., ISBN 978-3-85003-121-9
  9. ^ The Independent : King Edward VIII: Uncle who encouraged young Queen's Nazi salute 'plotted with Adolf Hitler to regain throne'.
  10. ↑ Politics am Obersalzberg ( Memento from January 6, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) on the Cottbus company , online at obersalzberg.de .
  11. ↑ See Anna Plaim / Kurt Kuch : At Hitler's. Housekeeping Anna's memories . Droemer / Knaur, 2005, ISBN 3-426-77758-4 .
  12. ↑ Der Berghof - Adlerhorst - Hitler's hidden power center , H. van Capelle, AP van de Bovenkamp, ​​Vienna 2003, p. 201., ISBN 978-3-85003-121-9
  13. ↑ war on the Obersalzberg ( Memento of 29 June 2009 at the Internet Archive ), online at obersalzberg.de .
  14. ↑ Reading sample from: Guido Knopp: Secrets of the "Third Reich"
  15. ↑ Stefan Kornelius: Hitler's Legacy in Washington - Die Bücher zum Wahn , article on Hitler's book collection, which is now in Washington in the Library of Congress , online at sueddeutsche.de . See also at sueddeutsche.de Claudia Fromme: Interview with art collector Robert C. Pritikin "I would have spent a million on it" at the auction of Hitler's Globe 2007 and Jörg Häntzschel: Art theft under National Socialism - Hitler's most beautiful pictures ( Memento from February 17, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) on documents on organized Nazi art theft.
  16. ^ Der Berghof - Adlerhorst - Hitler's hidden power center , H. van Capelle, AP van de Bovenkamp, ​​Vienna 2003, p. 232., ISBN 978-3-85003-121-9
  17. ↑ Geoff Walden: "From Haus Wachenfeld to the Berghof" , photos, also the demolition of the ruins in 1952, online at thirdreichruins.com .
  18. ^ The two-pillar concept ( Memento from January 13, 2017 in the Internet Archive ), History of Documentation Obersalzberg, online at obersalzberg.de

Coordinates: 47 ° 38 ′ 1 ″  N , 13 ° 2 ′ 31 ″  E