Obersalzberg: place of the crime – Bavaria

This place stands for both, and like hardly anywhere else in Germany both terms come together at Obersalzberg: That’s why the historians from the Institute for Contemporary History want to call their new permanent exhibition “idyll and crime”. The concept for this has existed for more than three and a half years, the exhibition organizers presented it down in the valley in the Berchtesgadener Kongresshaus. Up there, the workers had just blasted the excavation pit for the new building into the slope, a little behind plan at the time. But the construction work on the terrain, which was difficult in every respect, dragged on even further. Again the money was running low, so that the state parliament had to approve another eight and a half million euros in 2019. But now, as Bavaria’s building minister Kerstin Schreyer (CSU) has just announced, the extension for the Obersalzberg documentation is ready. The new permanent exhibition is scheduled to open next year.

Above all, it should be more contemporary in its presentation than the previous documentation, which was opened in 1999. It was supposed to remove Hitler’s retreat and second seat of government from the all too often pleasant Nazi horror of some visitors and, despite initial local resistance, was soon so successful that instead of the expected 40,000 visitors per year, around 170,000 people finally made their way through the light wooden building and pushed glass. The building, which had been built on the foundations of Hitler’s “Gästehaus Hoher Göll” and is now to be used as a seminar center, was, however, long too small, so that the Free State decided to build a new building in 2014. With construction costs of 30.1 million euros, it ended up being more than twice as expensive as planned, to the repeated annoyance of the housekeepers in the state parliament. In other memorials, too, where the focus is less on the Nazis themselves than on their many millions of victims, some frowned at the sums that flowed into the “perpetrator town” of Obersalzberg.

Tour of the bunker

“It was a challenging construction site. So I’m all the more pleased that we can hand over such a successful new building,” says Building Minister Schreyer, who in the meantime had pulled the rip cord and had several planners involved cancel the contracts. The winning competition design by a consortium led by the Vorarlberg architect Gerhard Aicher was completed by other offices. The approximately 1000 square meters of space for permanent and special exhibitions, a film hall and the new function rooms are largely located on the mountainside, with a lot of exposed concrete with narrow glass fronts on the outside. While parts of the bunkers in the mountain from the old building, which are a special fascination for many visitors, were only accessible as a dead end, they will become part of the tour from the new building.

In the future, Obersalzberg should no longer be a pure perpetrator location. The new permanent exhibition will also take a look at Auschwitz, Leningrad, Kaunas, Treblinka and Warsaw as well as the Hartheim killing center near Linz and tell of people from Berchtesgaden and the surrounding area who fell victim to the Nazis and their plans.