Luxury hotel to open on Hitler's Obersalzberg retreat

A new luxury hotel will open next month on the site of Adolf Hitler's alpine retreat, which also served as a part-time seat of government where he and other Nazi leaders often met. The new hotel, the Intercontinental Resort Berchtesgaden, will open on the Obersalzberg to guests on 1 March, the Bavarian Finance Ministry said on Thursday. The decision to build a hotel on the site above the German Alp town of Berchtesgaden has angered many Jewish groups. Officials have tried to address their concerns with a documentation center opened in 1999 to detail the area's Nazi past. In addition, the state of Bavaria has 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. 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.