The snow falls thick and silent over the Bavarian Alps, blanketing the steep slopes and dark pine forests in a shroud of white. But beneath this serene winter landscape, the echoes of a monstrous past are never far away. A new historical exploration, using rare color film shot by Eva Braun, has returned to Obersalzberg to compare the Nazi elite’s winter wonderland of the 1930s and 1940s with the stark, haunting reality of today.
The journey begins as it did for countless Nazi officials and visiting dignitaries, along the five-kilometer road that snakes up from the town of Berchtesgaden. The first surviving structures from the Third Reich era appear on the right, a collection of large Alpine chalets known as the Hohenfeld. These were originally built to provide married quarters for SS officers stationed at the mountain compound.
Today, only three of the original four buildings remain, one having been obliterated during the devastating British bombing raid of April 25, 1945, which laid waste to much of the Obersalzberg. The surviving chalets are now private apartments, their balconies overlooking modern chalet blocks, a jarring juxtaposition of history and contemporary alpine living.
Just beyond these residences, set back from the road, lies the entrance to the Hohenfeld air raid tunnels. These passages burrow deep into the mountain, a network of concrete and steel that once offered protection from the Allied bombs. The entrance remains, a dark maw in the hillside, sealed off from the public but standing as a silent testament to the paranoia of the regime that built it.
The tunnels were part of an extensive underground system that connected the key buildings of the Obersalzberg, allowing the Nazi leadership to move unseen and protected beneath the mountain.
Climbing a slight incline, the visitor is confronted by an enormous, monolithic structure that dominates the landscape. This is the Kohlbunker, or coal bunker, constructed in 1940 on the direct orders of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful and ruthless private secretary. Designed to hold 32,000 tons of coal, it stands as one of the most intact Third Reich structures on the mountain.
Rising 20 meters tall and stretching 36 meters wide, its sheer scale is intimidating. Many of its original steel doors remain, rusted but still in place. The coal was poured in from trucks on the roadway above, then smaller vehicles collected it from openings below to provide heating, light, and electricity for all the Nazi buildings.
In the recent snow, the bunker presented an eerie, otherworldly sight, reminiscent of the giant fortified bunkers at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia, now in Poland.
Further along the road, a substantial and well-preserved Nazi-era building comes into view, the Göring Adjutancy. This was the official residence of Reich Marshal Hermann Göring’s chief adjutant, General Karl Bodenschatz, and his staff. Göring himself had a grand house on the adjacent Obersalzberg Hill, but the Adjutancy served as the administrative hub for his visits.
Unlike Göring’s own residence, this building survived the war without a scratch and is today lived in as a private home, its historical significance masked by its mundane modern function. Göring’s house, purchased for him by the state in 1936 and given as a gift, was extensively expanded by the Reich Marshal. Though it was a small country house compared to his vast estate at Carinhall outside Berlin, it was a center of power and luxury.
The house was extremely badly damaged in the 1945 bombing raid, and a bomb crater can still be seen beside where the house once stood. The last of its remains were pulled down in the early 2000s to make way for the construction of the Kempinski Hotel that now dominates the Obersalzberg and Obersalzberg Hill.
However, one famous Nazi-era feature does remain today, Hermann’s Hill, a small promontory above the house that was a favorite seating area for the Reich Marshal and his family and guests. Behind the hill, leading into the forest, is the only surviving section of the Landhaus Göring, a broken flight of stone steps. But all is not what it seems, for the very extensive Göring tunnel system is completely intact, connecting the Landhaus to the Adjutancy building.
A surviving emergency exit is built into the bank of the Obersalzberg Hill below where the house once stood. Needless to say, these tunnels are closed to visitors, their entrances sealed and hidden from the casual observer.
Moving around to the opposite side of the Kempinski Hotel to a modern staff car park reveals another huge Nazi-era structure. These are the giant walls that hold up the hill, which were once part of enormous greenhouses that supplied fresh fruit and vegetables to Hitler’s kitchen and other kitchens on the Obersalzberg. The greenhouses were badly damaged by the bombing and later torn out in the 1950s, but the massive concrete walls were kept.
Later, they were used to support the hotel, which was built on top of the hill above. At the top of the greenhouses once stood a concrete bunker housing the anti-aircraft defense and communications center, which controlled the flak batteries positioned in the surrounding mountains to protect the village from Allied bombers. When the Kempinski Hotel was built in 2004, this bunker was simply buried and still exists intact.
The buried bunker connects to the Obersalzberg anti-aircraft defense and communication center tunnel system, which is completely intact.
Just down the hill from the greenhouse site and opposite the hotels on Türken is the entrance to that system. The original arched entrance was later made smaller in the 1980s, and a strong steel door was put on to prevent access by the public. On the opposite side of the road is the Hotel Zum Türken, one of the oldest buildings on the Obersalzberg.
The curious name comes from a veteran returning from war against the Turks in 1683. In 1911, it was converted from a house into a hotel, and in 1923, a young Adolf Hitler had lunch at the establishment with his mentor Dietrich Eckart. The owner was a critic of the early Nazis, however, and was forced to sell along with many other owners of properties in the valley to the Nazis in 1933.
For most of the Nazi period, the hotel housed 19 of Hitler’s bodyguards from the Reichssicherheitsdienst, his close protection detail of mostly ex-German policemen, and was also a telephone exchange. It was adjacent to Hitler’s home, the Berghof, and a wooden gate ran across the road with an SS sentry box controlling access to the Führer’s house from this direction. In the 1945 British air raid, the hotel was badly damaged, but unlike so many of the other structures on the Obersalzberg, it wasn’t pulled down postwar.
Instead, it was repurchased by the original owners and repaired. It closed in 2018 and was sold in 2020 but currently remains closed, though well-maintained, a ghost of its former self.
Opposite and standing above the Hotel Zum Türken was Martin Bormann’s house. Reichsleiter Bormann, Hitler’s powerful secretary and head of the Nazi party organization throughout Germany, was called the “Lord of the Obersalzberg” due to the power he wielded. He was responsible for forcibly purchasing homes in the valley and ordering the construction of new buildings and the massive tunnel system that still lies beneath the village today.
Bormann’s house was a large Alpine chalet that conveniently overlooked Hitler’s home, enabling Bormann to keep a close eye on comings and goings. Here, Bormann lived with his wife and ten children. The house was destroyed during the 1945 bombing raid, and its ruins were pulled down in the early 1950s.
Only scattered ruins can today be seen dotting the hillside. Bormann’s personal bunker system, however, remains intact, though inaccessible, beneath the hill.
Below Bormann’s house was the Unterverlin, the home of the chief of the Obersalzberg administration offices, SS-Oberführer Arthur Kannenberg. This building took a direct hit in 1945, blasting off a large chunk of the front, and the rest was pulled down in the early 1950s. However, a large amount of the original tin roof still lies at the site.
Below these ruins and set below the road that runs in front of Hitler’s house is one of the emergency exits for the Führer’s bunker system. It is a treacherous climb down to it in winter conditions, but it is possible to actually enter the first few feet of this tunnel, a chilling experience that connects the present directly to the darkest chapter of history.
Clambering up the slope to the road adjacent to the Berghof, Hitler’s huge chalet home, little remains of the house today. It is possible to make then-and-now comparisons at the site. The bomb and fire-damaged house was blown up by the West German authorities in 1952.
In one piece of film, Hitler and Bormann are seen walking down the stone steps outside the Berghof; today, only the overgrown site of where those steps once stood remains. In another, Hitler stands on the Berghof’s drive with the Hotel Zum Türken visible behind him. One of the few surviving features of the Berghof are parts of its driveway.
The retaining walls behind the wing of the house that juts out behind Hitler also survived. The main entrance to Hitler’s tunnel system beneath the Berghof was accessed through this section of the retaining wall at the rear of the house. The entrance is bricked up and lies beneath a pile of leaf litter, several feet below modern ground level.
Another emergency exit for Hitler’s bunker system beneath the house still exists on the far side of the present site, again involving a clamber around in the undergrowth. Interestingly, adjacent to it is another one of those bomb craters which litter the site, this one undoubtedly doing serious damage to the house in 1945.
Leaving the Berghof site, the path hikes up the hill to the Hoher Göll guest house, once used to house senior visiting officials and military officers to Hitler’s home. Although not damaged in the 1945 air raid, the building stood derelict for many decades before being developed into the original Obersalzberg Documentation Center, a display about the Nazi era. The building’s top floor was lopped off and replaced by a modern extension.
A new Documentation Center opened a few years ago opposite, and the Hoher Göll is now used for administration purposes.
The exploration then arrives at the huge Platterhof Hotel site. Opened as a hotel in 1877, it was extensively remodeled and enlarged in the Nazi era and used as a special guest house for dignitaries and officers visiting Obersalzberg. From 1943 to 1945, it was converted into a military hospital and rest center.
Badly damaged in the Allied air raid, it was restored and reopened in the 1950s as the Hotel General Walker, as Obersalzberg was taken over by the US Army as a rest and recreation center. Once it was returned to the German government in 1995, they decided to tear it down in 2000, a decision that seems unnecessary considering how popular the hotel was with tourists. However, one part of the Platterhof was spared the wrecking ball, the Tassenan Halle, which the Americans had restored into a restaurant they called the Skyline Room.
The rest of the Platterhof site is now just a car park for the Documentation Center and for buses ferrying tourists to the Eagle’s Nest, the Kehlsteinhaus far above.
Walking back towards the area of the Kempinski Hotel, the path passes by an area that was once full of buildings. In this field once stood the SS barracks that housed the Obersalzberg guard battalion, as well as many other important structures that are now completely gone. Badly damaged in the air raid, the whole lot was progressively pulled down after the war, leaving nothing but an empty field today.
At the end of the road is a small guardhouse built postwar at the site of a gate from the Nazi era that controlled access to the road up to Kehlstein Mountain and onto the Eagle’s Nest. In the late 1930s film taken from the greenhouses, the Eagle’s Nest road gate can be seen in the background.
Venturing further afield, two places that still exist in some form and were closely associated with the Nazi leaders are explored. The first is the Gutshof, an experimental farm ordered constructed by Bormann in 1936. It lies at the foot of the hill down the road from the Berghof in the valley.
To reach it, the path passes the remains of a large SS guardhouse that once blocked the road to Hitler’s house. It survived the war in a damaged state before being torn down; today, its foundations are clearly visible beside the road. Opposite the entrance to the Gutshof still stands the studio and the house of Hitler’s architect and minister of armaments production, Albert Speer.
The Gutshof is also mostly intact, though a huge multi-story wing was torn down in 2007. The Gutshof survived the RAF raid mostly intact, and the Americans converted it into a golf course and winter ski resort. However, Eva Braun and many in Hitler’s inner circle enjoyed skiing in this area long before the war.
The final building to visit is only a short walk from the Gutshof. When Hitler was in residence at the Berghof, he visited it every afternoon, walking one of two ways to the building, mostly downhill, and being driven back to his house by car afterwards. This was the Mooslahnerkopf Teahouse, Hitler’s favorite building on the Obersalzberg.
It was built for him on the orders of Martin Bormann in 1937. The teahouse survived the RAF raid completely intact and was then extensively looted by US troops. But because it was Hitler’s favorite, unlike the more famous Kehlsteinhaus or Eagle’s Nest, which he vocally disliked, it had to go.
In 1951, the Mooslahnerkopf Teahouse was demolished, though a substantial amount of ruins survived until 2006 when they too were excised from the hill. The famous overlook has survived largely intact to the present, though the railings and bench are modern replacements. Just a few remains of steps and foundations exist today, the last remnants of Hitler’s favorite building on the Obersalzberg.
In a final haunting image, Hitler and Albert Speer are seen walking back towards the Gutshof area. Some quarter of a mile down the path from the overlook position, fifty feet or so below the path, is one of the last intact mole bunkers used by SS sentries that patrolled the forest guarding Hitler’s teahouse 24 hours a day. In this lonely spot in the winter forest, one half expects to see a steel-helmeted SS sentry moving quietly among the fir trees, still patrolling his lonely beat 80 years after the end of the war.
The snow continues to fall, covering the ruins and the memories, but the history of this beautiful and cursed landscape remains, frozen in time for those who choose to look.