Berchtesgaden and the Eagle’s Nest

The last real day of the tour, and for once the itinerary has saved something with a view.

One caveat printed on the tour page and worth repeating: the visit is strongly dependent on weather. The Kehlstein road closes for snow, ice and high wind, and mid-September is early enough that it usually should not be a problem and late enough that it can be. If the mountain is shut, the Documentation Centre and bunker system at Obersalzberg go ahead regardless.

Getting up there

You cannot drive to the Kehlsteinhaus. A bus takes you up a road cut into the mountainside — six and a half kilometres, one tunnel, a single hairpin, gradients that make the engine note a topic of conversation — and then you walk through a marble-lined tunnel 124 metres into the rock to a brass-panelled lift that lifts you the final 124 metres to the summit.

The whole thing was built in thirteen months between 1937 and 1938 by around 3,000 workers, at a cost usually given as north of thirty million Reichsmarks. Twelve men died building the road. It was presented to Hitler for his fiftieth birthday in 1939 by Martin Bormann, who had commissioned it largely to improve his own standing.

Hitler is thought to have gone up perhaps a dozen times. He disliked the altitude, worried about the lift being struck by lightning, and found the thin air unpleasant. The photographs everyone knows were taken at the Berghof, lower down, where the actual business of the Obersalzberg was done.

What is left, and what is not

The Obersalzberg was heavily bombed by the RAF on 25 April 1945 and the Berghof burned out shortly after; its remains were demolished in 1952 specifically to stop the site becoming a place of pilgrimage. There is almost nothing to see of it now — a stretch of retaining wall in the woods, and a very good Documentation Centre built over the surviving bunker complex, which the tour goes into.

The Kehlsteinhaus survived because the bombers missed it. It has been a restaurant since 1952, run under lease with proceeds going to a charitable trust. No shrine, no memorabilia, nothing on the walls. The only original interior feature of note is the red Italian marble fireplace in the main room, a gift from Mussolini, chipped along the edges because American soldiers in 1945 broke pieces off it for souvenirs.

That detail is the one I most want to see in person.

Easy Company got here first-ish

The 506th came into Berchtesgaden on 5 May 1945. The French 2nd Armoured Division had reached the town earlier the same day, and there is a long-running and fairly good-natured argument about who was where when.

What is not in dispute is that the paratroopers spent the following days in the most agreeable circumstances of their war — requisitioned houses, mountains, spring, the shooting effectively over — and that they emptied a wine cellar belonging to Hermann Göring holding something in the region of ten thousand bottles. For a company that had jumped into Normandy eleven months earlier and lost more men than it started with, that is not a bad final chapter.

Germany surrendered on 7 May. The war in Europe ended at 23:01 on 8 May.

The thing this day sets up

You come out of the lift onto a terrace with sixty kilometres of the Bavarian and Austrian Alps in front of you, and a menu.

It will be one of the most beautiful places I have ever stood, and it was built by a regime that had opened Dachau five years earlier, twelve miles from Munich, which we will have walked around the previous morning. The tour spends nine days putting those two facts next to each other and finishes by putting them at the same table.

I do not expect that to resolve. I think that is the point.