After breakfast and a little shopping for toiletries, we headed on east toward our final destination for the day, Berchtesgaden. We followed the good map we got in Fussen and spent part of the time on the backroads of the Deutsche Alpenstrasse and part on the Autobahn.
We also spent part of the time following this MR2 so I could get a picture.
One of the cool views from Berchtesgaden is this one of Mount Watzmann. The weather was variable to say the least, but I got one good shot.
Berchtesgaden is in the mountains, so most of the directions are up or down or both. When we arrived we checked into our hotel and immediately walked into town to find a place for kaffee and kuchen.
We walked back to the hotel by this route through a park. It went both up and down. The cafe we snacked at is the middle building on the right.
I found it interesting that it was cold and damp, but they had a form of lantana growning near the cafe.
This Hotel Bavaria is where we stayed our 2 nights in Berchtesgaden. The link is to the room we stayed in. They had parking for the car and they were almost on the flat. We later learned that the railroad tunnel to nowhere on the left is the place where the Nazis tried to hide much of their stolen art in boxcars. Of course the Allies found it when they took over.
This is the part of the train station where Hitler had his own personal arrival and departure point. He would come out the middle arch to wave to his adoring followers.
The River Ache runs through Berchtesgaden. It is greenish, largely due to the level of glacier melt in the water.
We liked this little covered bridge with the flower boxes.
Here's Trout looking over the river with Mount Watzmann in the background.
Part of the time we were there, the river flowed normally.
But when it rained, the water got a little more interesting.
We spent 2 nights and one day in Berchtesgaden. That was so that we could go on a tour of the Eagle's Nest. I highly encourage you to follow the link and go to the description and the content of the tour.
Some people say that it's not worth the money to go on a guided tour, that you can use a guidebook and look for yourself. I think it was well worth the money. Our tour guide was a woman who has lived in Germany for over 20 years and started her career there doing similar tours for the US Army when it controlled all that you see on the tour. I went there twice when I lived in Germany, but we certainly didn't have her as a tour guide.
She is married to another American who has lived most of his life overseas. He's written a book about Berchtesgaden. When the Americans turned all the facilities back over the Germans, they were able to start a business doing these English only tours because no one else was doing that. It was shortly after the two parts of Germany were reunited and the Germans needed all the income they could get to help deal with bringing in East Germany.
I was so fascinated by the bunker part of the tour, that I didn't take many pictures and what I did take weren't worth keeping. The link is to some that are on Google. At the end of this posting there is also a link to more from the museum located over part of the bunkers.
When you have a tour by a knowledgable person, you learn a lot both from what they say and from the answers to the questions they are asked. Some fun and significant things that we learned will be noted with the pictures.
The Eagle's Nest was built as a 50th birthday present for Hitler, his mistress Eva Braun and other high-ranking Nazis. It was a tea house and not intended for overnight. Eva spent more time there than he did.
The Eagle's Nest is on top of the mountain. It was supposed to be bombed into oblivion like the houses and other buildings farther down the mountain that were actually the 2nd seat of the Nazi Party. But the RAF didn't hit the target, so it remains fully intact.
To get to it you go through this tunnel and into an elevator to get to the top. The tunnel is the same length as the elevator to the top. One of the reasons Hitler didn't go here is that he was claustrophobic. He couldn't handle the tunnel or the elevator.
These are people waiting for the elevator to go back down. Except for the removal of the benches that lined it, the elevator is the same as during Hitler's time.
So here we are at the top. At this moment, we are above the clouds.
They start to dissipate a bit.
And we can see some of the mountains better. These are not the kinds of views Hitler liked to see. In addition to being claustrophobic, he was also afraid of heights.
Eva was not afflicted by such fears. She came to the tea house often and hiked up this short climb to the cross on a regular basis.
I suspect she didn't call Adolf back in those days. Trout has a penchant for calling friends from odd places. Our mobile phone bills illustrate that when we get home.
Before heading back down, I took this close up of the medallion over the tunnel entrance.
The clouds finally blew away long enough to see the building from below.
Note that the sign is in German and English.
Here people are waiting for the buses to go back down the mountain.
Trout white knuckled it on the way up because it was cloudy a lot of the way. I sat next to the window both directions and got these pictures on the way down.
An interesting story we heard about the building of this road. It is very twisty and steep. At one point it's a 27% grade. Yeah, that's not a typo. The Germans brought in Italian road builders at great expense to build the road because they were the best mountain road builders.
Typically roads were built with cobblestones back then, but this one was asphalted from the beginning to make it safer and less slippery for Hitler. Remember that for the next posting.
After returning to Berchtesgaden, we crossed the street to a little outdoor cafe for a bite to eat. While there, two separate single travelers from the US struck up conversations with us. One young man had separated from his wife and was traveling to try to deal with that. We "counseled" him as best we could.
One woman about our age was there trying to learn German better. She was an opera composer and librettist. If we understood her correctly, she is a professor at Rice University in Houston. She said her vocabulary was great, but she wasn't so good at speaking German and that's what she was working on.
Several years ago she came to the area to work on a libretto. She stayed in a guesthouse on the side of the mountain, the Hotel zum Turken. It was March, it was snowed in, a taxi took her to it and she was the only guest. The owner allowed her to go into the bunkers below it -- with a flashlight, and the phone passed through the security gate, which was locked. She was to call the owner when she was ready to come out.
The signficance of this to us is that we had just visited the Obersalzberg museum on our tour and been told the story of this guest house. When the Nazis built their compound, both above and below ground, at this level of the mountain, they "bought" out the families that lived there. If they wouldn't be bought, they would wake up in the night to the sounds of their roof being removed from the house.
After the war, the families of the former owners were allowed to return to their places, at least to the ones that had survived the bombing, if they could prove their connections to the owners who were displaced. The Zum Turken was one of those places. If you go to the link above, there is a little information about that at the hotel's website.
After they took over the Zum Turken, the SS was quartered there and their bunkers were below. Until the late 1990s, these were the only bunkers anyone could visit and our tour guide took people there.
If you go to the Obersalzberg museum link, you will see more pictures of the bunkers. They are bare concrete now, but when they were built they were opulent with hardwood floors, carpets, wood paneling, elaborate baths and all the comforts the high-level Nazis would need to survive for a long time if they were forced to do so. There were advanced systems to pipe in fresh air, heat and cool the rooms, remove the water and sewage, keep the dampness from seeping through the walls, etc.
