Berghof

It was not a birthday present.

It never was, as it is often mistaken for, his Berghof residence, which said, 800 meters below on the mountainside.

And it also wasn't a castle or a fortress as it often has been made out to be.

And the building he did use to stay in, the Berghof, that was destroyed, I think, at the end of the war?

The Berghof was damaged in 1945 during the British air raid at the end of the war and then set on fire by the retreating SS troops.

In May 1945, it was basically a ruin that remained.

And this ruin was demolished in 1952.

What

Stevens has been given permission to film on the Obersalzberg, Hitler's private refuge high above the town.

The Berghof is a ruin, a symbol of the demise of a murderous ideology.

From the Ober Salzburg, Stevens traveled to nearby Austria, first to Salzburg and then on to Innsbruck, sightseeing in a country which had willingly thrown itself into the arms of the Nazis.

The small camera team also drove to the Brenner Pass on the border with Italy and South Tyrol.

And so I found hilarious is, you know, the Wheatcroft collection that, that, that eccentric Englishman from central casting, Wheatcroft, who's got the most extensive collection of Third Reich artifacts on this planet from, you know, like Hitler busts to Panzer tanks and everything in between.

I guess when the Berghof was dynamited, there was still the basement areas one could access and Berghof and Wheatcroft and his buddy, they went there, they rappelled down.

You know, into the basement area.

I mean, they're lucky it didn't collapse on them.

Bormann brought up surrounding farmland, until the complex stretched across 10 square kilometers, or about 3.9 square miles, commissioning roads, barracks, guest houses, and the famous Kerlsteinhaus, or Eagle's Nest.

He moved his own family into a house within sight of the Berghof, which was Adolf Hitler's holiday home in the Obersalzberg.

For Gerda, this closeness to Hitler was part of her entire adult life, so her children played within reach of the men who were ordering mass murder across occupied Europe.

The domestic reality of this life was considerably less ceremonious.

How did the Germans prepare for the Allied landings in France? How much did they know before the actual landings began? And what role did the German commanders play in the situation that unfolded on the ground when the Allies landed? In this episode, we will examine the German defenses and troops on the Normandy coast, the command debates on the best strategy to defeat the Allied landings once they took place, and to what extent the Allied deception efforts worked.

[suspenseful music] German dictator Adolf Hitler famously slept through the opening hours of the invasion in his vacation home, the Berghof, in the Bavarian Alps on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944.

When he was finally awoken, his reaction was not of concern or anger, but of relief.

He declared to his generals, "Once defeated, the enemy will never again try to invade." He believed that the defensive plan for a cross-channel invasion would work, and his armies were strong enough to throw the Allies back into the sea.

And on that trip, she started eating meals with Hitler, and at first she was really intimidated, but then she realized that they were pretty friendly and informal.

So the train headed to Hitler's vacation property, a wood-paneled nightmare called the Berghof, and this was for sure a property that Traudl knew about already because it had been in the news.

Like, she'd seen photos.

So it was kind of intimidating arriving at this big, famous politician's house.

It wasn't cozy or anything, but it was fine, and she had her own bedroom there too.

This one had blue and white bedding that she really liked.

And life at the Berghof was a tiny bit tricky because there, Hitler had a mistress named Eva Braun.

So everywhere else in his life, he was regarded as a bachelor, but at the Berghof, he had Eva.