Nazi command centre to be hotel

Hitler's former command centre is to become a hotel

MUNICH, Germany -- Adolf Hitler's Alpine command centre is to be turned into a hotel and golf course, it is reported.

Construction work to transform the Eagle's Nest into the leisure centre is due to start in July, a German newspaper said on Saturday.

The 140-bed luxury hotel will cost 140 million marks ($60 million) to build and will be on the same site as Nazi leader Hermann Goering's summer residence, Welt am Sonntag reported.

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 centre 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.

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 106-hectare (260-acre) site near the Austrian border in 1998.

The Eagle's Nest tea room 1,834 metres (6,000 feet) high on the mountaintop was built by the Nazi party as a present to Hitler on his 50th birthday in 1939.

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

It was one of the few buildings to survive the Allied bombing and has long been a state-run cafe.

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

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.