Germany: Night on the evil mountain

From the hotel lobby, guests look out on the snow-clad garden where Martin Bormann once hobnobbed with his Fuehrer. Picture / Reuters

Last week I got the giggles, courtesy of the Nazis. I was checking in as the first, and possibly last, Jew to be a guest at a beautiful, new $185 million InterContinental Resort Hotel at, er, Berchtesgaden - Hitler's beloved holiday home in the German Alps, near the Austrian border.

Pristine and modern, it is a complete contrast to the standard cuckoo-clocks-and-Eva-Braun's-knickers twee Alpine hotel style, the jewel in the crown of the British InterContinental Hotel Group.

It's stylistically cool to the point of being a bit chilly. There's even a little style joke in the lobby - the mandatory display of animal antlers, but made of modishly twisted shiny metal.

The Berchtesgaden InterContinental is painfully trendy - and there's no hint of wiener schnitzel on the restaurant menu.

In the spa there are rooms for different massage techniques, plus one marked Meditation, where you can think things over while staring at a large crystal that changes colour.

Perhaps the InterContinental management should spend an hour or two in the Meditation room, because they're suffering corporate stress as the press sniggers at their courageous - or foolhardy - decision to stick a huge, expensive hotel in a town with a PR problem.

Berchtesgaden was more than just somewhere that the Fuehrer liked putting on his lederhosen, taking the air, walking the german shepherds and watching old movies.

A mountainous peninsula of Bavaria that is surrounded, with duly ponderous symbolism, by his native Austria, Hitler cast it as the embodiment of the whole Germanic Volk myth, and hence the spiritual home of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Berchtesgaden was where he dictated much of Mein Kampf, received world leaders and directed much of the course of world history, Holocaust included. It often served as the Third Reich's principal seat of government.

Even the mountains were tainted. On top of one, Martin Bormann, Hitler's disgusting little private secretary - a Nazi so rank and servile that even Hermann Goering referred to him as "the dirty pig" - built Hitler, as a 50th birthday present, a summer house, the Eagle's Nest, unaware that he was terrified of heights. Hitler rarely went there. It is now a restaurant.

At Berchtesgaden, as many as 5000 "Hitler wetter", as the fans were called, would spend hours gawping with binoculars in the hope of a glimpse of moustache. If they got lucky and the leader passed by, they would scrabble to gather the stones on which his flat feet had fallen.

It's worse for the hotel management than even that dodgy CV suggests.

The InterContinental isn't just in the vicinity of Berchtesgaden - it is carefully sited above the town, at a hamlet called Obersalzberg, which was the epicentre of Nazi Berchtesgaden. The hotel is, in fact, in Hitler's back garden, on the precise spot where Bormann and Goering had their own villas.

Whereas Berchtesgaden is a standard Alpine town, Obersalzberg is Nazi Central.

Neo-Nazis still like to leave wreaths on Hitler's birthday.

See that golf club? That was Bormann's farm.

The building being turned into a restaurant? That was Albert Speer's office.

If there is such a thing as land poisoned by its history, Obersalzberg has to be up there with Dachau and Auschwitz, the Gulag, Bhopal and Tiananmen Square - none of which have attempted to build a luxury resort bang on the very spot where the action took place.

In its defence, management points out that before Hitler, Berchtesgaden was a respectable mountain resort as popular with Jews as anyone.

The scenery is exquisite. Salzburg, where the Von Trapp family lived, is only a short way across the Austrian border, and it's hard not to start humming Climb Ev'ry Mountain as you grind up the 1:4 gradient to Obersalzberg.

InterContinental's proudly proclaimed slogan is as marvellous an example as you'll find of what a group of not very bright people can do when they put their minds to it: "It's not just a peak. It's a treat."

The hotel chain's magazine, Highstyle, describes the resort as "a cosy spot for a display of thigh-slapping local dancing", and a nearby valley as "a particularly fine spot for yodelling".

Until the moment I checked into the hotel I, too, was in a Sound of Music frame of mind. It was only at the reception that the tunes changed.

Suddenly I was whistling Springtime for Hitler, from Mel Brooks' The Producers - and Springtime for Hitler is subtitled A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden.

It's only when you're handing over your credit card in Hitler's back garden that InterContinental's attempt to rebrand Berchtesgaden - an enterprise not unlike Max Bialystock's brainwave in The Producers of staging a Hitler musical - seems on the stupid side.

The joke of Springtime for Hitler was that it was meant to be a tax loss. The InterContinental Berchtesgaden, by contrast, is a serious attempt to make money.

As I was going to my room, I started on the lyrics for the opening song to my follow-up to The Producers. Titled The Hoteliers, a chorus of brown-suited bellhops sing: "We're the Volk who burned the Reichstag / But be sure and have a nice Tag," ... and that's as far as I got before sitting on my bed and wondering what exactly I was doing here.

Was it creepy to sleep in Hitler's garden?

To be honest, you sort of forget about it. The rooms are luxurious and I had a magnificent dinner and slept like a top.

The few guests were all German and all a wee bit shy about being there. The consensus is that the Bavarian Alps desperately needed a quality hotel because the tourist trade needs all the help it can get.

The Germans themselves - and I am a genuine fan of modern Germany - have done everything they can to facilitate InterContinental's rebranding enterprise.

Jewish groups have been brought in to advise on the project. Some have been guardedly pro-resort, others - notably the Simon Wiesenthal Centres - vociferously anti.

But there is little of the 'Don't Mention the War' syndrome in these parts - it's actually difficult to stop people referring to it.

The Bavarian government has built a superb little museum near the hotel, and it's well patronised. It uses audio-guiding technology boldly stamped Made in Israel.

And Berchtesgaden people tend to be doughty advocates of the Jewish state. When the Israeli bobsleigh team, known as the Frozen Chosen, were in town they were cheered to the rafters by locals.

The hotel does its corporate best not to shy away from the obvious. In every bedside cabinet is a 600-page volume on the history of Nazism and the region - Die Todliche Utopie (The Deadly Utopia).

All staff, even the cleaners, had police checks to root out Nazi and neo-Nazi connections.

Even the InterContinental's business model has been designed, so the management says, to exclude the dread possibility of a neo-Nazi group managing to book it for a convention - the price mechanism has been used to see off this ugly scenario: rooms start at $400 and suites $4000.

But last week was still a tough one for Jorg Bockeler, the InterContinental's general manager.

First came a possible intervention from the spectre of Adolf - on opening day, the Berchtesgaden region experienced the second-coldest temperature ever recorded in Germany, -43.6C.

Then a German journalist observed that "the shower-heads in the hotel rooms are remarkably similar to the fake ones used in the Dachau gas chambers".

This remark was enough to send Bockeler into near-apoplexy.

"These shower-heads were first used at the Savoy 104 years ago," he says.

"It's a pathetic comparison. InterContinental is aware that this hotel is built on sensitive ground, but we believe the time is right to move on, in terms of tourism, and we do so with integrity and transparency."

"So, who is staying at the Berchtesgaden," I ask Herr Bockeler.

"It's a lovely place but I can't quite imagine spending my holidays here."

"At the moment," said the harassed manager, "bookings are extremely strong, but it's 98 per cent Germans, Austrians and Swiss."

Later, when Austrian sommelier Thomas Breitweiser shows me his fine cellar, he says: "There's no question it's a really nice place. The only trouble is, yeah, Hitler was here. That could be a problem."

- INDEPENDENT