The Berghof, 12 February 1938: Schuschnigg on the Steps
Kurt Schuschnigg, Chancellor of Austria, arrived at the Berghof at eleven in the morning and found Hitler waiting on the steps in a brown uniform. Three men stood behind him: Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Wehrmacht High Command; Walter von Reichenau, who commanded the army group on the Austrian border; and Hugo Sperrle, who had just come back from bombing Spain. None of them had any diplomatic business at a bilateral talk.
They were the set dressing. Hitler took the Austrian upstairs to his study alone and screamed at him for two hours. Austria's whole history was one long act of treason. He, Hitler, had a historic mission and Providence had chosen him to complete it. He had only to give an order and Austria's border defenses would be a joke. Schuschnigg, a heavy smoker, asked if he might light a cigarette. He was told no.
The demands came after lunch in a typed ultimatum from Ribbentrop: a Nazi as interior minister with control of the police, amnesty for imprisoned Nazis, an end to any restriction on the party. Schuschnigg objected that he could not sign on behalf of the Austrian president. Hitler flung open the door and shouted for Keitel. The general arrived at a run and was told to wait. He had been summoned for no reason except to be seen.
Schuschnigg signed before dark. Franz von Papen, driving him back to Salzburg, remarked that the Führer could be quite charming.
The Berghof was a stage. A rented holiday chalet was rebuilt into a theatre of intimidation, with the largest window in Germany framing a mountain where a medieval emperor was said to sleep, and the leaders of Europe were brought up the hill to be broken in front of the view. It worked on Austria and it worked on Britain. Then the man who built it went off to run his war from a swamp in East Prussia, and the house on the mountain outlived its purpose, its owner, and the regime. The only way anyone found to deal with it afterwards was dynamite.
From Haus Wachenfeld to the Berghof: How Hitler Bought the Obersalzberg
Haus Wachenfeld: The Chalet Paid For with Mein Kampf Royalties
Hitler first came to the Obersalzberg in the spring of 1923 to visit Dietrich Eckart, his mentor, who was hiding from the police in a guesthouse under the name Herr Wolf. Hitler liked the mountain and kept coming back. In 1928 he rented Haus Wachenfeld, a modest timber-and-plaster chalet with green shutters that belonged to the widow of a businessman from Buxtehude. His half-sister Angela Raubal came to keep house. Five years later, three months after becoming Chancellor, he bought it outright with the money Mein Kampf was now bringing in.
For a few years it stayed a chalet. Photographs from the period show Hitler in lederhosen on the terrace, feeding deer, receiving children. Heinrich Hoffmann sold the images by the million. This was the Obersalzberg's first job: to make a dictator look like a man on holiday.
The 1936 Rebuild: Degano's Great Hall and the Lowering Window
In 1935 Hitler sketched what he wanted and gave it to the architect Alois Degano, who wrapped the old chalet inside a much larger house and finished it in the summer of 1936. The new building was called the Berghof, the mountain farm. Its core was the great hall, a room with a red marble fireplace, a Gobelin tapestry, a globe, and a single window nine meters wide that could be lowered electrically into the wall until the whole room opened onto the Alps.
The view was the point. Directly across the valley stood the Untersberg, where legend put Frederick Barbarossa sleeping in a cave until Germany needed him. Hitler told visitors it was no accident he had chosen to live opposite it. When he launched the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 he named it after the emperor.
Albert Speer, who was often in the hall, noted a flaw. The garage sat directly under the window, and when the glass came down the smell of petrol came up. Nobody mentioned it to the host.
Bormann's Führersperrgebiet: Evicting the Obersalzberg
Martin Bormann took over the mountain. From 1936 he began buying the farms and guesthouses around the Berghof on Hitler's behalf, and those who would not sell were made to. Karl Schuster, who ran the Türken, a hotel that had stood beside the chalet since before the First World War, refused the first offer and was arrested and held until he signed; he was then banned from the district. His hotel became the headquarters of the RSD, Hitler's personal security police, with cells in the basement. Around fifty properties changed hands in two years. Families who had farmed the slope for generations were handed a cheque, given a deadline, and watched their houses pulled down behind them. Bormann had the meadows regraded, planted a model farm with imported cattle, and ordered a greenhouse the size of a railway shed so that Hitler's vegetarian kitchen could have fresh produce in January.
The bill for all of it was paid from the Adolf Hitler Fund of German Industry, a slush account topped up by companies that wanted to be remembered. Bormann kept the books. Nobody audited them.
By 1938 the Obersalzberg was a sealed compound of some ten square kilometers with three checkpoints, an SS barracks, a hotel for party guests, a greenhouse producing Hitler's vegetables, houses for Bormann, Göring, and Speer, and a network of roads that Bormann kept extending. Above it all, on a rock spur 800 meters higher, he built the Kehlsteinhaus, a pavilion reached by a brass-lined elevator cut through the mountain, as a fiftieth-birthday present for Hitler. It cost thirty million Reichsmarks. Hitler, who disliked heights and thin air, went up perhaps a dozen times and preferred the Eagle's Nest as somewhere to send guests. The house he actually lived in was the one below.
Diplomacy at the Berghof: How Hitler Broke Austria and Bluffed Britain
Lloyd George and the Duke of Windsor: The Berghof Guest Book
The visitors came before the victims. In September 1936 David Lloyd George, the man who had led Britain through the First World War, took tea in the great hall, admired the window, and went home to write in the Daily Express that Hitler was the greatest living German and that the country had been reborn under him. He was 73 and had been out of office for fourteen years, and Hitler treated him with a deference he showed almost nobody, walking him to his car and standing in the drive until it had gone.
In October 1937 the Duke of Windsor, who had been King Edward VIII ten months earlier, came up the mountain with the Duchess. The couple stayed two hours. Photographs show Hitler on the steps with the Duke, and Hitler remarked afterwards that the American divorcee the British had refused to accept as queen would have made a good one. The Duke gave a modified Nazi salute on leaving, and the British Embassy, which had asked him not to go, had to explain it for years.
Neither man was threatened. They were the warm-up: proof, circulated through Hoffmann's cameras, that the master of the house could receive the great and be liked by them. The theatre of the steps was being rehearsed for people who would arrive with less choice.
Schuschnigg's Day at the Berghof and the Anschluss
The document Schuschnigg signed on the evening of 12 February 1938 handed the Austrian police to Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a Nazi lawyer from Vienna. Four weeks later, on 12 March, German troops crossed the border to cheering crowds and Hitler drove to Linz and then to Vienna. Austria ceased to exist.
Schuschnigg was arrested the same day. He spent the next seven years in Gestapo custody, first in the Hotel Metropol in Vienna, then in a cell at Dachau, then in Sachsenhausen, with his wife and infant daughter housed in a hut inside the wire. He survived, emigrated to the United States, and taught political science in St. Louis for twenty years. He never went back to the Berghof.
Chamberlain at the Berghof, 15 September 1938
Seven months later a 69-year-old man who had never been on an aeroplane boarded one at Heston. Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich, took a train to Berchtesgaden, and was driven up the mountain in the rain. Hitler met him on the same steps.
They talked for three hours in the study upstairs with only the interpreter Paul Schmidt between them. Ribbentrop, furious at being excluded, retaliated by refusing to hand over Schmidt's notes, so the British Prime Minister flew home with no record of what had been said to him. Hitler wanted the Sudetenland, the German-speaking rim of Czechoslovakia, and said he was prepared to risk a world war to get it. Schmidt later recalled the volume rising and falling as Hitler worked through his grievances and Chamberlain waited, hands folded, for the translation. Chamberlain went home and wrote to his sister that, for all the hardness he had seen in the face, he believed Hitler was a man who would keep his word once he gave it. The Munich Agreement followed on 30 September. The Sudetenland went to Germany without a shot, and Chamberlain came home to cheering crowds of his own.
Six months after that Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia. The word he had given at the Berghof lasted 175 days.
22 August 1939: Hitler's Obersalzberg Speech to the Generals
The great hall could hold a lot of officers. On 22 August 1939, with the lowering window closed, Hitler addressed around fifty senior commanders of the army, navy, and air force in civilian clothes, so that the cars arriving at the Obersalzberg would not attract notice.
He told them Poland would be attacked within days. He told them Ribbentrop was flying to Moscow that night to sign a pact with Stalin, which drew audible gasps from men who had spent their careers preparing to fight the Soviet Union. Franz Halder, chief of the general staff, took notes in shorthand. Among them: close your hearts to pity, act brutally, the stronger man is right.
Nobody objected. The generals went down the mountain and the invasion began on 1 September.
Life at the Berghof: Eva Braun, the Tea House, and Hitler's Longest Home
Eva Braun's Color Films and the Berghof Household
Eva Braun moved into the Berghof in 1936, at the age of 24, after Angela Raubal, who despised her, was eased out of the housekeeping. Her rooms were next to Hitler's bedroom with a connecting door. In front of guests she was the house photographer, a young woman with a Leica and a 16mm camera and two Scottish terriers. Officially she did not exist. Foreign visitors never saw her; she was sent upstairs when they arrived.
Her Agfacolor films are the reason the Berghof is the best-documented dictator's home in history. Summer 1939: men in suits and women in bright dresses on the terrace, Hitler in a pale jacket squinting at the Untersberg, Blondi, sunbathing, gymnastics, a little girl in a dirndl being handed a bunch of flowers. Down in the valley that same summer, the Jewish families of Berchtesgaden were being stripped of their property and pushed out of the district.
The household ran on Hitler's clock. Herbert Döhring, the house manager from 1936 to 1943, and the secretaries who came and went with him described a life of profound tedium. He rose around eleven. Lunch was at two and could last until four. Every afternoon the party walked down through the woods to a small round tea house on the Mooslahnerkopf, where Hitler ate apple cake and usually fell asleep in his chair while the others talked in whispers. A car took him back up. After dinner there were films in the great hall, then conversation by the fire that ended at two or three in the morning with the same monologues the guests had heard the night before. Traudl Junge, who joined the secretaries in 1943, described the evenings as endless and the guests as afraid to yawn. Speer, who had a house on the mountain and could have gone home, wrote that he sat through hundreds of these nights and came away from them with nothing but a sense of time destroyed.
The staff signed pledges of silence about everything they saw. Döhring's wife Anna ran the housekeeping, the domestic staff were vetted by the SS, and the woman who was the reason for the connecting door officially did not live there. Every employee on the mountain knew, and none of them said so until the war was over.
He was here more than anywhere else. The Dokumentation Obersalzberg puts the total at more than a quarter of his time in office. For five months of 1944, from late February to mid July, the Berghof was formally the Führer headquarters and the war was run from a house with a tea house and a terrace.
D-Day at the Berghof: The Morning Nobody Woke Hitler
On the night of 5 June 1944 Hitler went to bed late as usual. In the early hours the reports began arriving: paratroopers in Normandy, then ships, then the beaches. The duty officers at the Berghof did not wake him. He had left standing instructions not to be disturbed, and no one wanted to be the man who woke him for a landing that might be a diversion.
He came down at his normal hour. The situation conference was held around noon, and two of the armored divisions that might have counterattacked the beaches had been waiting all morning for his personal release. That afternoon he drove to Schloss Klessheim near Salzburg to receive the Hungarian prime minister and told him the invasion was welcome news, because the enemy could now be destroyed where he stood.
Three days earlier, on 3 June, the Berghof had hosted a wedding. Eva Braun's sister Gretl married Hermann Fegelein, Himmler's liaison officer, in a civil ceremony in Salzburg with Hitler, Himmler, and Bormann as witnesses, followed by a party at the Berghof and a reception up at the Kehlsteinhaus that went on for two days. Eleven months later Fegelein was shot in the Chancellery garden in Berlin for trying to leave.
14 July 1944: Hitler Leaves the Berghof for the Last Time
On the morning of 14 July 1944 Hitler's convoy drove down the mountain to the station at Berchtesgaden and his train left for East Prussia. Camouflage netting hung over the Berghof roofs. Smoke generators had been installed on the slopes. Five kilometers of tunnels were being dug under the compound, with a bunker under the Berghof itself, and the work would go on until the last weeks of the war.
The tunnels were Bormann's last project on the mountain. Begun in the summer of 1943 after the Hamburg raids, they eventually ran to some six kilometers of galleries and nearly eighty rooms cut into the rock beneath the compound, with separate systems for the Berghof, the Platterhof, the SS barracks, Göring's house, and Bormann's own, linked by stairways and blast doors. Hitler's section had a bedroom, a study, and a sitting room for Eva Braun, with the same tapestries and carpets as the house above. Thousands of laborers, many of them Italian and Czech, dug through the winter of 1944 on a project whose only purpose was to keep alive the fiction that the Berghof would be needed again.
He never came back. Six days after he arrived at the Wolf's Lair, a briefcase went off under his map table.
The End of the Berghof: Göring's Arrest, RAF Bombs, and the SS Fire
23 April 1945: Göring's Telegram from the Obersalzberg
Hermann Göring had moved into his house on the Obersalzberg, 300 meters from the empty Berghof, after leaving Berlin on 20 April 1945, Hitler's last birthday. Three days later, with the Red Army in the suburbs of the capital, he sent a telegram to the Führerbunker asking whether, since Hitler was now cut off, he should assume leadership of the Reich as designated successor, and setting a deadline of ten o'clock that night for a reply.
Bormann, who had been waiting years for something like this, read it to Hitler as treason. The reply came back stripping Göring of all his offices. That night the SS detachment on the Obersalzberg, under Obersturmbannführer Bernhard Frank, surrounded his house and put the Reichsmarschall under arrest in his own living room. He was still there when the bombers came.
25 April 1945: The RAF Raid on the Obersalzberg
Bomber Command had wanted the Berghof for years and finally got permission when the war was almost over. On the morning of 25 April 1945, 359 Lancasters and 16 Mosquitos flew across the Alps and dropped around 1,200 tons of bombs on the Obersalzberg, including the six-ton Tallboys that had sunk the Tirpitz. Some 3,000 people were on the mountain. Most were in the tunnels.
The results were poor for the tonnage. The Berghof took three direct hits, lost its roof and one wing, and stayed standing. The Kehlsteinhaus, a target, was missed entirely. Göring's house and Bormann's house were destroyed, the SS barracks wrecked, and a camp for Czech laborers and a settlement for evacuated children were hit hard. Thirty-one people were killed, several of them children. Two Lancasters went down; four airmen died. Göring, in his bunker, emerged into the rubble of his house and was driven off under guard to a castle in Austria, where the Americans took him on 9 May.
The British newspapers ran headlines about Hitler's chalet in ruins. The photographs showed something less satisfying: a big house with its roof gone and its walls up.
4 May 1945: The SS Burns the Berghof and the Americans Arrive
Hitler had been dead since 30 April. On 4 May, with American and French columns in the valley below, the SS on the Obersalzberg looted what was worth taking from the Berghof, soaked the rest in fuel, set it alight, and left. The house was still burning when soldiers of the US 3rd Infantry Division and Leclerc's French 2nd Armored Division reached Berchtesgaden the same afternoon, having raced each other for it.
The next day the 101st Airborne arrived and the Berghof became the most photographed ruin in Europe. GIs sat on the terrace where Eva Braun had filmed her guests and drank Hitler's wine. They carried off silverware, monogrammed napkins, books, uniforms, and Eva Braun's photograph albums, which surfaced in American attics for the next seventy years. The great hall was a black shell. The window frame was empty. The Untersberg was still there.
Erasing the Berghof: The 1952 Demolition and the Obersalzberg Today
30 April 1952: Bavaria Dynamites the Berghof
The Americans kept the mountain. The Obersalzberg became a US Army recreation area, and the burned-out Berghof became a problem nobody had planned for: a pilgrimage site. American soldiers took their families up to pose in the window frame. Germans came up the road to stand in the ruin, chip souvenirs off the marble, take photographs, and, in some cases, leave flowers. By the early 1950s the Bavarian authorities were receiving reports of visitors turning up on 20 April.
The state had the land back on paper and the Americans on the ground, and the two governments agreed that the shell had to go. The Bavarian government decided to end it. On 30 April 1952, seven years to the day after Hitler shot himself, engineers packed the walls with explosives and brought them down. The rubble was cleared, the foundations buried, and spruce trees planted across the site. The ruins of Bormann's and Göring's houses went the same way. The date was not a coincidence, and the state said so.
From US Army Resort to Dokumentation Obersalzberg
American soldiers skied and drank on the Obersalzberg until 1995. The Platterhof, the old party guesthouse, ran as the General Walker Hotel for GIs and was demolished in 2001 after Bavaria took the land back. The Türken was rebuilt in 1950 as a hotel and still stands beside the empty Berghof plot, with its bunker tunnels open to visitors for a few euros.
In October 1999 the Institute for Contemporary History opened the Dokumentation Obersalzberg on the site of the guesthouse, and in September 2023 a new building opened beside it with a permanent exhibition titled Idyll and Atrocity, 350 objects including Eva Braun's films, and access to the tunnel system beneath. It draws around 170,000 visitors a year. Two hundred meters away, on the plot where Göring's house stood, a luxury hotel opened in 2005 after a public argument about whether a five-star spa belonged on Hitler's mountain. The argument was lost; the hotel is full.
Visiting the Berghof Site Today: Obersalzberg, Berchtesgaden, and What Remains
The Obersalzberg sits at around 1,000 meters above Berchtesgaden in the far southeast corner of Bavaria, thirty minutes from Salzburg airport and two and a half hours from Munich. Buses run from Berchtesgaden station to the Dokumentation Obersalzberg car park, which is also where the Kehlstein buses leave for the Eagle's Nest between May and October. The Dokumentation is open daily except Mondays in winter, charges a small admission, and is not recommended for children under twelve. Allow two hours for the exhibition and the bunker.
The Berghof itself takes ten minutes. A path leads from the Türken hotel into the woods a short way, to a long wall of dressed stone with a gap in it: the retaining wall of the garage that once sat beneath the great window. A few steps and foundation stubs show through the leaf litter. A small information board explains what stood here. The trees planted in 1952 are now seventy years old and the slope where the terrace was is a spruce plantation, dark and quiet, with the Untersberg visible through the trunks in exactly the place it was visible from the window.
The ethics of the Obersalzberg were settled in 1952 by a government that decided some ruins should not be allowed to stand, and the decision has held up. The Dokumentation is serious and unsentimental. The Türken bunkers are a slightly grubby private attraction. The luxury hotel is there. Visitors who come for the Kehlsteinhaus and the view mostly do not walk the ten minutes into the woods, and the ones who do find that there is almost nothing to see, which is the point.
The stage is gone. The scenery is still in place.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Berghof
Where was Hitler's Berghof and can you visit the site?
The Berghof stood on the Obersalzberg, a mountainside at around 1,000 meters above the town of Berchtesgaden in southeastern Bavaria, close to the Austrian border and about thirty minutes from Salzburg. The house itself no longer exists. Visitors can walk a short path from the Hotel Türken to the remaining retaining wall and foundation fragments in the woods, visit the Dokumentation Obersalzberg museum and its bunker system on the site of the former party guesthouse, and take the bus up to the Kehlsteinhaus, the Eagle's Nest, which survived the war intact.
How much time did Hitler spend at the Berghof?
More than a quarter of his time in office, according to the Dokumentation Obersalzberg, which makes it the place he stayed longest between 1933 and 1945. He rented the original chalet, Haus Wachenfeld, from 1928, bought it in 1933, and rebuilt it as the Berghof in 1936. For five months of 1944 the Obersalzberg was formally the Führer headquarters. His final departure was on 14 July 1944, when he left for the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia and never returned.
What happened to the Berghof at the end of World War II?
On 25 April 1945 the RAF bombed the Obersalzberg with 359 Lancasters, hitting the Berghof three times and destroying the roof and one wing. On 4 May 1945, with American and French troops entering Berchtesgaden, the SS looted the house and set fire to what remained. American soldiers then occupied the ruin and stripped it of souvenirs. The Bavarian government dynamited the shell on 30 April 1952, the seventh anniversary of Hitler's suicide, to stop it becoming a shrine, and planted trees over the site.
Who visited Hitler at the Berghof?
The Berghof hosted David Lloyd George in 1936, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in 1937, Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg in February 1938, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in September 1938. Schuschnigg was pressured into an agreement that led to the annexation of Austria a month later, and Chamberlain's visit began the negotiations that ended in the Munich Agreement. On 22 August 1939 Hitler used the great hall to tell around fifty senior commanders that Poland would be invaded within days.
What was the Berghof's famous window?
The great hall of the Berghof had a single window roughly nine meters wide that could be lowered electrically into the wall, opening the room onto a view of the Untersberg mountain across the valley. It was described at the time as the largest window in Germany and appears in most photographs and films of the house. Albert Speer noted that the garage sat directly beneath it, so that when the window was lowered the smell of petrol drifted into the hall.
Is the Berghof the same as the Eagle's Nest?
No. The Berghof was Hitler's house and everyday residence on the Obersalzberg. The Eagle's Nest, or Kehlsteinhaus, is a separate pavilion built by Martin Bormann on a rock spur roughly 800 meters higher, presented to Hitler for his fiftieth birthday in 1939. Hitler used it rarely. The Kehlsteinhaus was not hit in the 1945 raid, was spared demolition, and is now a restaurant and viewpoint open from May to October.
Sources
Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis — Ian Kershaw (2000)
Inside the Third Reich — Albert Speer (1970)
Hitler's Interpreter — Paul Schmidt (1951)
Austrian Requiem — Kurt von Schuschnigg (1946)
Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary — Traudl Junge (2002)
Living with Hitler: Accounts of Hitler's Household Staff — Herbert Döhring, Karl Wilhelm Krause and Anna Plaim (2018)
The Obersalzberg and the Third Reich — Institut für Zeitgeschichte / Dokumentation Obersalzberg (2023)
Hitler's Mountain: The Führer, Obersalzberg and the American Occupation of Berchtesgaden — Arthur H. Mitchell (2007)
Destroying Hitler's Berghof: The Bomber Command Raid of 25 April 1945 — Oliver Haller, Canadian Military History (2011)
The Bunkers at the Obersalzberg — Florian M. Beierl (2003)
Dokumentation Obersalzberg — Idyll and Atrocity permanent exhibition — Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (2023)
Hitler at Home — Despina Stratigakos (2015)
