Dull days under the rule of a maniac The Berghof was Adolf Hitler's home in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, 180 Km South of Munich. With the Wolfsschanze, his bunker in East Prussia, this was the place where Hitler spent most time during the war. Hitler used to say that it was at the Berghof he took the best decisions of his life. The Berghof was developed in stages from a much smaller house, named Haus Wachenfeld. It was a vacation home built by a lawyer from Buxtehude, Otto Winter. Winter's widow originally rented the house to Hitler for 100 reichsmarks in 1928. In 1933 Hitler was eventually able to purchase the house with funds he received through the sale of his political book "Mein Kampf" (1). An orgy of demolition was required before the mansion could reach its final stage. In order to prepare the site, houses, hotels and even a sanatorium for handicapped children had to disappear. Between 1933 and 1937, the NSDAP bought 54 plots on the Oberslaberg, totalling 2,9 million sq. meters. Fifty houses were torn down, their owners were paid off but under considerable pressure to sell. Hitler's palace, with its landscaped parks and road, cost around 100 million Marks (2) and the construction itself took the life of several of the 6,000 workers employed during the works when explosives and dynamite were used without sufficient care. Schloss Berghof as it was called by the Germans was built at an altitude of 1,000 meters and finally consisted of 60 rooms filled with expensive furniture, Gobelin tapestries and paintings by Dutch and Italian or German masters. Hitler bought the paintings from dealers like Haberstock or Frau Almers in Munich. On the ground floor was Hitler's dining room. The tables were made of pine and furnished with silver, porcelain and crystal. The table silver was engraved with the initials AH and stamped with the German eagle and the swastika. On the same floor, there was the famous great hall and the drawing room, the later being dominated by an enormous stove and decorated with an old Italian painting depicting the Colosseum in Rome. The great hall was seperated from the drawing room by an archway : the chief feature of the Hall was a 32-meter giant panoramic window (pic above) that could be fully opened. The walls of the hall were covered with Gobelin canvases, including Venus et Mars by Paris Bordone while the floor was laid with red velvet and strewn with rare Persian carpets. On the Bechstein grand piano was a bust of Richard Wagner. In the entrance hall of the mansion was a portrait of Bismarck that was lit up at dusk. |
| Reichsleiter Martin Bormann took over "Haus Hudler," a small home owned by a Dr. Seitz. This house site was ideal for Bormann, as it overlooked Hitler's Berghof and much of the rest of the Obersalzberg complex. From here, Bormann could keep an eye on everything, including the comings and goings at the Berghof. Bormann later enlarged and modernized the house, installing costly interior furnishings. Bormann also had an extensive air raid shelter and bunker system built into the hill behind the house, connecting to the main air raid control and communications center underground. (pictures : Walden collection) |
| The best thing about the Berghof was the terrace : it was a large square space paved with slabs of Solnhofer stones and it had a stone balustrade. You could see Salzburg castle in the distance and down below lay Berchtesgaden surrounded by the peaks of the Watzmann, the Hoher Göll and the Steinernes Meer. |
| Landhaus Göring after its final renovation, with the Untersberg mountains in the background. The view from Göring's house was the best of any of the Obersalzberg Third Reich homes. Since summer 2002, a large luxury Inter-Continental hotel has been built adjacent to the site of Landhaus Göring, covering the top of the Göringhügl hill. This hotel has radically changed the landscape and views in this area. Much of the Göringhügl hill was bulldozed away in June 2002, removing most of the former remains in this area. |
| Opposite rose the Untersberg. A broad paved road passed at the foot of the Berghof winding up out of the valley in sinuous curves and going to the Turken hotel, the Platterhof hotel, the barracks of some 2000 SS guards built in 1937 and the chalet of Martin Bormann who actually was the mastermind of the Obersalzberg complex. Bormann’s construction programs leveled most of the privately-owned retreat houses and mountain farms, substituting administration buildings, SS guard barracks, a huge greenhouse to supply Hitler’s vegetarian wishes, an experimental farm, a rebuilt hotel for visiting dignitaries, and housing complexes for the workers needed to serve all of this. Perhaps Bormann’s most lavish achievement was the Kehlsteinhaus ("Eagles Nest"), built on a mountain spur almost 3000 feet higher than the Obersalzberg and reached by a road with only one hair-pin curve, which was an engineering feat of the day. It cost millions of Marks and Hitler did not like it very much : only foreign dignitaries were taken there just for the pleasure to show off and impress them with the engineering prowess and the view. A monotonous life Life at the Berghof was as irregular as Hitler's timetable, but strenuous, very monotonous. In the morning, the building was quiet as if abandoned. Activity really began around noon when Hitler deigned to wake up and Generals and military personnel gathered for the first conference of the day. The great hall (picture on top) with his gigantic windows became then the scene of violent arguments and life and death decisions. During the conference nobody could enter the hall and Hitler's guests had to patiently wait until the conference was over to get some food. Most of the time, it never ended before 3pm, sometimes 4pm. It seemed to his guests that Hitler was never hungry. When it was finally over, Hitler came down from the great hall into the living room. Then Eva Braun, Hitler's secret mistress, appeared too preceded by the yapping of her two Scottish terriers, Stasi and Negus (sic). |
| An unused 105 x 148 mm color postcard featuring Haus Wachenfeld, Adolf Hitler's home on the Obersalzberg outside Berchtesgaden. This is a side view of the simple alpine home of the Reichschancellor before the major remodeling of 1936. |
| An unused 105 x 149 mm color postcard featuring Berghof Wachenfeld, Adolf Hitler's home on the Obersalzberg outside Berchtesgaden. This is a side view of the remodeled alpine home of the Reichschancellor. |
| Hitler would go to her according to a ceremonial never changed, would kiss her hand in a very formal Austrian way and would shake hands with his guests. In the first years of the Berghof, the main guests were Frau Brandt, wife of one of Hitler's personal doctor and an ex-Olympic swimmer champion, Frau von Below, wife of Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, Frau Schneider, a friend of Eva Braun and Gretl Braun, Eva's sister. After the outset of the war, frequent guests were Frau Morell, wife of Dr Morell, Hitler's private doctor until almost the end of the war, Frau Dietrich, wife of Sepp Dietrich, one of Hitler's favorite Generals, Baldur von Schirach and his wife Henriette Hoffmann (called Henny). She was the daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann from Munich who was the personal photographer and a close friend to Hitler. Through this relationship von Schirach was part of Hitler's inner circle. However to be part of this circle, sometimes it sufficed to love Wagner and his operas. Other frequent habitués were Albert Speer, Hitler's favorite architect and his friend, Hoffmann himself, although his pronounced alcoholism, eventually provoked the ire of Hitler and he was forbidden at the Berghof, Frau Marion Schonmann,another friend of Eva and inevitably the Görings, the Goebbels and Himmler although Himmler and Goebbels could not stand each other and did their best to ignored the presence of the enemy. |
| Berchtesgaden, central place, circa 1930, a SA meeting (picture Walden collection) |
| Eva Braun was always very well dressed and groomed. She never wore twice the same outfit, wore expensive jewellery and had a folder with a sample of all her dresses. This habit exasperated Hitler who always challenged women fashion's eccentricities and wondered why they had to change constantly their outfit and why they were all obsessed with being "slim, bony and skinny". Hitler preferred dark haired, strong women from Southern Germany, even the ones looking a little bit boyish. Geli Raubal, his love of the late 20s who committed suicide in 1931, was his favorite type. An oil painting of her was on permanent display in the great hall at the Berghof, next to the "Nanna" of Feuerbach (picture to the left). |
| The waiting time before lunch was served passed in small talk : when Hitler was not teasing Eva about her dresses, it was about her two terriers, "those dusting brushes", to what she replied in calling Blondi, Hitler's Alsatian dog, a "calf". Blondi was never admitted inside the living room by Eva but from times to times Hitler begged her for a minute with Blondi : her terriers were then sent away and Blondi could briefly enjoyed the presence of his master. At table, the conversation was trivial and cheerful, most of the time : Hitler used to talk about the pranks he had played at school and loved to evoke the early struggles of the NSDAP. He had a tendency to repeat the same stories again and again and political subjects and the issue of the war were totally avoided. At the Berghof, more than anywhere else, Hitler lived a double life and he did not want any of his guests to know anything about the war. Once Henriette von Schirach asked Hitler about the fate of "those poor Jews" who seemed "miserable" and wanted to know whether the Fuehrer was aware of it. She had trespassed her rights : the next day she had to pack and was sent back to Austria where her husband was a Gauleiter. Nevertheless Hitler could tell very charming, witty stories about his youth and liked to banter the women about their habits : smoking was frowned upon and forbidden inside the house, lipstick was a subject of disgust for the Fuehrer who used to joke that it was made from the fat skimmed off sewage in Paris. Hitler used to mock the women about their willingness to sacrifice themselves to fashion chic :"all women, he said, want to be the envy of their female friends. They always do the opposite of what a man likes." |
| A shameless looter of the great minds He was also a very good imitator, notably of the diminutive King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel, whose small height he was often making fun of . But after the outset of WW2, he became more taciturn and rather hermetic : he became ranting about the same old issues again and again, notably after the catastrophe of Stalingrad in 1943. His phenomenal memory helped him to pretend he had visions of his own and he fooled thousands of people -and his guests- in believing he was a genius : once he was diserting about one of his favorite subjects when Christa Schroeder, one of his private secretaries, interrupted him to say that she had read something very similar in Schopenhauer and she underlined the very strange coincidence. Hitler became extremely embarrassed and coldly replied that "the knowledge of any man almost always has its origins in the knowledge of another man." Lunch generally lasted one hour and Hitler, who was a fervent vegetarian since the death of Geli, ate the diet of the Zabel sanatorium, a well known nursing home run by a Pr Zabel. He had a peculiar passion for unrefined linseed oil and he loved baked potatoes with curd cheese and would pour linseed oil on them. Very frugal, Hitler had a sweet tooth for beans, peas and lentles. He hated meat and did his best to take his friends away from it by telling horrible stories about the slaughterhouses, the pool of blood and the way the butchers cut off the quarters of meat. Some of his guests could not possibly stomach the description. But Hitler did not care. After lunch the company walked to the small summer teahouse (Teehaus) that was set in the woods to a walking distance of 30 minutes. Eva would take with her her camera or her cine-camera and would try to get some good shots of her lover but he shied away from sun and always wore a cap that hid his features. His fragile eyes did not take sun very well and he used to say that he wanted to keep them in good form to read military maps and air raid reports. Nevertheless with a huge dose of patience Eva sometimes succeeded to get the best color shots of Hitler ever taken. There tea and coffee were served, Hitler drank apple-peel tea, ate baked apple cake and generally dozed off with no concern for his guests while every man would go out to smoke. To go back to the Berghof, Hitler always used his black convertible Volkswagen but no guest was ever admitted to seat with the Fuehrer in this car. After the promenade to the summer house, Hitler would fall asleep until the evening conference. Eva would use those free hours to entertain their guests with some forbidden foreign movies or censored German films that were passed to the Berghof directly from the Ministry of Propaganda by Goebbels himself. |
| Looking down on and from the Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle's Nest). Photo credit: Florida Center for Instructional Technology |
| Dinner was about 8pm, so close to the lunch time that it is a miracle that guests were ever again hungry. Menu consisted of platters of cold meats, salads, fried potatoes with eggs and meat or noodles with tomato sauce and cheese. Veggies and fruits came all year long from Bormann's glasshouses in his model nursery garden. Hitler ate fast and quite a lot but always the same unattractive vegetarian food. For dinner, Eva was always showing off a parade of elegant clothes but she was not allowed to change her hair style : she tried once and she was so severely reprimanded by Hitler that she never did it again. She would do anything like a little dog to please her master. Diners were generally more lively than lunches, Hitler loved flowers so the table and the living room were sparse with them. He loved women with flowers in their hair or on their dresses and complimented them for hours if they had some to enhance their elegance or their beauty. He was a rather boring host, checking on all and everything, controlling every details with great concern and always wanted to know what his guests were saying or why they were laughing. Even in a relax atmosphere he was a bully and a tyrant. After dinner, Hitler took his friends in the great hall where the great hearth was sometimes lit but not always because Hitler loved chilly atmosphere. Some of his Generals pretended that they got arthritis problems for standing for hours in the Great Hall or in his East Prussia bunker without any heat. Hitler had bought the Berghof notably because it was oriented to the North and protected from heavy sun in summertime. When some of his guests were laughing in a corner of the Hall, Hitler wanted to know why. It became a stratagem for his Generals or his friends when they wanted to inform him about something unpleasant. After dinner around 9pm the evening conference started and it was not over before midnight. Otto Günsche (1917–2003) who was a Sturmbannführer in the SS and a close aide of Adolf always came at the end of the dinner to tell his Fuehrer that the conference was ready. Once again Eva took advantage of the situation to take their guests to the bowling alley where she gave them an idea of the last movies not to be seen in town. |
| The living room at the Berghof (view from an original postcard). Note on the wall below to the left portraits of his parents. |
Obsessive monologues By the time Adolf entered back the great hall, it was around midnight and time for one of his favorite chats around the great hearth when it was lit. Broad sofas and large armchairs had been drawn up in a large semi-circle, to the back of the room a single lamp was switched on and several candles flickered on the mantelpiece. The Fuehrer drank tea and the rest of the company whatever they liked : there was no ban on alcohol even French. Brandy, cognacs and w Alsatian wines were merrily passed around. Only tobacco was forbidden. Hitler liked to talk to Frau Bormann, a mother of 10 children, about his family but she was a shy person, fearful to displease the Fuehrer and constantly worried about her husband's infidelities. She was a bore and the conversation usually languished. So Hitler used to turn to Pr Blaschke who was too a vegetarian but a heavy smoker and he pretended to the dismay of Hitler that nicotine was less dangerous than alcohol because it purified oral cavities and helped to stimulate the blood. But most of the times Hitler, especially after 1942, turned to his obsessive rants about religion, races, christianity, women, the failures of his Generals and his debuts in politics. His guests would doze off or listen politely. Martin Bormann's often took notes of those monologues in a series called "Hitler's table talks". About 4 or 5 am, the master would leave the living room and everyone would woken up :"suddenly, wrote Traudl Junge in her Memoirs, there was a cheerful atmosphere that would have delighted Hitler if he had been there." I am not personally sure that this last statement is correct : as any bully or tyrant, Hitler could not stand a cheerful atmosphere that he had not generated himself in his own peculair and weird way. |
| Eva and Adolf on the terrace of the Berghof. Hitler wears his inevitable Tyrolian hat to shield from the sun that was detrimental to his eyes |
The Berghof was bombed in 1945 After 1943 as the bombings over Germany intensified Hitler feared an attack on the Berghof. Hundreds of men worked on a huge complex of shelters in and around the Berghof for months : the rock has been hollowed in many places and a large air raid shelter was carved out and contained everything necessary to sustain life for Hitler and his people. But Berchtesgaden was not a prime destination of the Allies, it was only on the bombers' flight path. It is only at the end of the war in 1945 -because the Allies feared that Hitler would leave Berlin and set up an "Alpine redoubt" to continue the war from the mountains- that the Royal Air Force bombed the Obersalzberg complex on 25 April. Hitler abandoned any plan to stay at the Berghof in July 1944 after the attack on the 20th in his East Prussia bunker. Henceforth he retreated in his Berlin bunker barely capable to control the situation, to give coherent orders and to monitor the main elements of the army. He started to blame everybody and their brothers for his own mistakes and shortcomings and was only a failed dictator in respite for less than a year. Later on May 4 1945, American and Free French forces took the town. Troops ransacked the buildings for trophies, enjoying the tins of caviar and flasks of wine left behind. Soldiers found a train car belonging to Hermann Goring filled with priceless art looted from across Europe. One of the conditions for the return of the Obersalzberg to German control in 1952 was the destruction of the remaining ruins. Accordingly, the ruins of Hitler’s Berghof, Bormann’s and Göring’s houses, the SS barracks complex, and other associated buildings were blown up and bulldozed away. The Kehlsteinhaus was saved, because it had not been bombed (although it was on the target list, it was apparently too small to spot and hit) and the Bavarian government recognized its tourism potential. On May 5, Germany surrendered. The war in Europe was over. The master of the Berghof and his wife Eva of the last minute were dead. |
LIFE AT THE BERGHOF |
| End of an era : the site of the Berghof in may 1945 |
| May 1945 : the living room is not even the shadow of what it used to be after looting by local residents and Allied troops |
| In November 1938 the English fashion magazine Homes & Gardens profiled on page 193-195 the home of Adolf Hitler for its readers...... The magazine even complacently wrote :" t is a mistake to suppose that week-end guests are all, or even mainly, State officials. Hitler delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, singers, and musicians. As host he is a droll raconteur; we all know how surprised were Mr. Lloyd George and his party when they accepted an invitation to Haus Wachenfield." |
| An elevator built into the mountain goes up to the Kehlsteinhaus. A 3-ton marble slab above the door to the tunnel, which leads to the elevator, is engraved with the words "Erbaut 1938". The door to the tunnel has handles in the shape of a lion. The interior of the elevator has solid brass walls and mirrors to make it look less confining, since Hitler was known to suffer from claustrophobia. On his infrequent visits to the Kehlsteinhaus, Hitler would stand in the exact center of the elevator. |
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| The Berghof April 1945 |
| Aerial photograph of the promenade from the Berghof to the Teehaus. |
| (1) Sales of Mein Kampf made Hitler a very rich man. Mein Kampf was compulsory reading for party members but married couple often received it at their wedding. In 1930, sales of MK were 54,000 but jumped to 854,127 in 1933. This year Hitler declared an income of 1.2 million Marks. In the following years, the copyright produced over 1 million Marks but Hitler did not collect all. By 1944, le NSDAP controlled 90% of the publishing industry through a monopoly, Standarte GmbH & Herold Press, that Hitler co-owned personally. The idea of a simple and frugal Hitler with modest tastes is a myth. (2) The cost of building an airport in 1930 |
| Nanna by Anselm Feuerbach (1829-1890) |
Step by step, the Berghof became Hitler's favorite residence and a vast mansion where he entertained his friends and the Heads of States who were his allies in the War like Mussolini of Italia, King Boris III of Bulgaria, Ion Antonescu of Romania and Monsignor Josef Tiso of Slovakia. The location was magnificent with a splendid and breathtaking view over the Alps and the whole habitation was extremely well furnished. Like Goebbels or Göring who had his own private villa nearby as Martin Bormann had too, Hitler's tastes were expensive. Minister of Armaments Albert Speer too had his villa on the Obersalzberg that was the must-location of the era. |
| From here a wide marble staircase led up to the first floor to Hitler's private suite , which adjoined the rooms of Eva Braun. One of the rooms in Hitler's appartment was a picture gallery. Here stood a cupboard inlaid with different woods that used to belong to Frederik II whom Hitler admired so much. His study had a light-brown table and furniture made of maple and over the chimney hung a portrait of Moltke. The whole mansion owned 3 sq.kms of the neighbouring slopes that included the 1,800-meter Mount Kehlstein. |
| The best feature of the Berghof was probably its terrace, a large square space paved with slabs of Solnhofer stones and it had a stone balustrade. You could see Salzburg castle in the distance and down below lay Berchtesgaden surrounded by the peaks of the Watzmann, the Hoher Göll and the Steinernes Meer. |
| Venus et Amor by Bordone covered the walls of the great hall |
