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This article was first published 11 years ago

Hitler's holiday resort to become a luxury hotel

Last updated on: April 2, 2012 16:50 IST

Image: Nazi holiday resort
Photographs: Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

German dictator Adolf Hitler's Nazi holiday resort, which spans nearly three miles along the coast of the Baltic island of Ruegen, will soon be converted into a 400-bed luxury hotel and 400 apartments, a media report said.

In fact, it's the Block One of the resort, Colossus of Prora, which is to be converted into a luxury hotel and an apartment block.

The resort, said to be the largest holiday camp ever constructed by Hitler in the 1930s, was sold for 2.2 million pounds at an auction in Berlin.

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Hitler's holiday resort to become a luxury hotel


Photographs: Steffen Gera/Wikimedia Commons

The building, the single-biggest sold in post-war Germany, had a reserve price of 700,000 pounds, but telephone bidding at the Berlin auction last Saturday sent the price soaring, the Daily Mail reported.

Prora was constructed on the Baltic island of Ruegen by the stormtroopers of the Nazi "Strength Through Joy" leisure organisation over a six-year period and occupies nearly three miles of beachfront.

It was meant to provide holiday entertainment for 20,000 of Hitler's hordes at any one time. But not a single Nazi ever got to stay there.

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Hitler's holiday resort to become a luxury hotel


The Nazis viewed leisure as just one more aspect of human activity to be governed by the party.

The last rooms of the "Butlins-of-the-dark-side" were finished just as World War Two began in 1939 and Prora was left empty, the greatest white elephant of all time. It was occupied after 1945 by the Red Army and became a secret base.

After German reunification, all the buildings were given listed status and a very few have been transformed into holiday flats.

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