Hitler's Alpine Home Now A Hotel

(AP)  A contentious new luxury hotel will open next month on the site of Adolf Hitler's retreat in the German Alps, the Bavarian government said Thursday.

Hitler's haunt above the town of Berchtesgaden served as a part-time seat of government where he and other Nazi leaders often met to plan Germany's assault on Europe and the Holocaust. The U.S. military used the area as a resort after World War II, before handing it back to Germany in 1996.

The decision to build a hotel on the site angered many Jewish groups, whose concerns Bavarian officials have tried to address with a documentation center opened in 1999 to detail the area's Nazi past.

Additionally, the state of Bavaria kept ownership of the land and set the condition that the hotel be designed for affluent tourists — precautions designed to help keep out neo-Nazis.

The new hotel, the Intercontinental Resort Berchtesgaden, will open on the Obersalzberg mountaintop to guests on March 1, the Bavarian Finance Ministry said in a statement.

When launching the project in 2001, officials said the hotel would include 138 rooms — complete with swimming pools, a health spa and nearby ski areas — and would reconnect the site with a 19th-century tourism tradition that predated the Nazis.

Most of the Obersalzberg buildings were destroyed by Allied bombers in 1945. Bavarian officials blew up Hitler's guest house in 1952 out of fears it would become a neo-Nazi shrine.

U.S. military forces occupied Obersalzberg after the war. Used as a U.S. ski-and-golf resort until 1996, the site remains a popular tourist destination for American soldiers.