Friday, July 5, 2019
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View from the hotel breakfast room, with our car second from L,
not far from a drop-off into the Berchtesgadener Ache River |
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| Hotel Schwabenwirt Breakfast |
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| Hotel Schwabenwirt Breakfast room |
Our first order of business was to drive up to Obersalzburg to visit the
Dokumentationzentrum/ Documentation Center then the
Kehlsteinhaus/known as Eagle's Nest.
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Documentation Center (1999) is built over a bunker in the area where
Hitler purchased a chalet and had it expanded in 1935 to become
his vacation home, then a place where he spent most of World War II |
As we waited for the center to open, an employee came out to suggest we go to
Kehlsteinhaus/Eagle's Nest first, as it can get very crowded. That was the best advice on this trip! We were able to get tickets for the first convoy of four buses to ascend the single-lane 6.5 km/4 mile road that has five tunnels and one hairpin turn, plus many curves along the edge of cliffs as we climbed 800 m/2600'. After arriving at the upper bus station, you had to state the time of the bus you planned to take on the return. The trip takes 20 minutes, and the buses run every 25 minutes. We chose to return on the 10:35 bus.
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| Now we had to walk through a tunnel into the mountain |
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| The entrance to the tunnel is protected by double doors |
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| Kehlsteinhaus as seen from the summit (KSS) |
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Although Hitler did not visit Kehlsteinhaus very often as he
disliked heights, the Scharitzkehl room has been left as it was in his time;
Eva Braun, however, came often to sunbathe |
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| Scharitzkehl room has a perfect view of Königssee |
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| Conference room with original wood beams |
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The fireplace in the conference room was gift from
Benito Mussolini; it is chipped by early souvenir hunters |
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Back down at the upper bus station, a view
showing the distance the elevator travels |
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| Panorama view towards Austria from the upper bus station |
Now it was time for the Documentation Center. Everything is labeled in German, but there are brochures in English describing each section.
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I was just noticing that Hitler also
had a unique hairstyle for his time |
The National Socialist Movement/Nazism is said to have been born in München/Munich, and centered in Bavaria. In 1921 Adolf Hitler assumed control of the National Socialist German Workers' Party that wanted to make Germany Great Again. In the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the party attempted to take over the Bavarian government as a first step to revolt against the post-World War I Weimar Republic. Hitler was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in prison, of which he spent less than one year. The Putsch and trial served to give Hitler lots of publicity and time in jail gave him the opportunity to write the first part of his manifesto,
Mein Kampf/My Struggle. After his release, Hitler moved to Berchtesgaden, staying at a hotel to write the second volume of his book. He quietly reorganized the National Socialist Party, and this time decided to use legal means to manipulate the political system.
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Winterhilfswerk/Winter Fund to collect money
to help those traditionally unemployed in the winter;
the Nazi party established its own welfare organization
then banned all private charities, so that the Nazis
could engage in social engineering by selecting
who could receive government benefits |
The bunker here was initially a series of interconnecting air raid shelters that were constructed beginning in 1943 when Allied bombing became a problem for the Nazis.
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| This may have been the power generator section of the shelter |
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| A blind shaft once had stairways to connect levels |
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| Shelter corridor |
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| Machine gun nest to protect the entrances |
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| Heading back down the mountain to Berchtesgaden |
Although we put Hallein, Austria in the GPS, it took us back to Berchtesgaden. So we decided to do the
Salzwerk/Salt Works here.
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| Salzwerk/Salt Works of Berchtesgaden |
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For the tour of the Salt Works, everyone had to
don a one-piece suit, modeled by Kent |
No photos in the Salt Works. First we took a mine train, straddling the benches, and zipped through narrow tunnels.
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| The mine train at the end of the tour |
We then walked through several caverns as the history and techniques of salt mining were explained. To go from one level to another in the mine, you straddle a kind of wide banister and slide down. We did that twice. There was also a boat ride across a flooded cavern, and a taste of the 27% salt water. Then the train back. We learned that the brine was also pumped to Bad Reichenhall, after Berchtesgaden became part of Bavaria in 1815. The brine traveled through 29 km/18 miles of wooden pipe, and was raised 356 m/1168' uphill, using a pump developed by Georg von Reichenbach, which was in continuous use from 1817 until 1927!
The process of mining salt (called solution mining) sounds a bit like fracking. However, the only pressure involved in salt mining is to pump the brine to the surface, whereas downward pressure is used to fracture rock. Empty salt caverns have been used to store liquid petroleum gas, and the pressurized liquids can cause collapsing.
Berchtesgaden was celebrating 500 years of salt mining in 2017. Salt has been mined in the area of Salzburg since about 400 BCE. How did these people know about the salt deposits deep underground?
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A carved statue shows a man carrying a small
version of a salt miner pulling a cart of rock salt |
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| Lunch was Gulasch over Spätzle ... |
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| ... and too many potato wedges with sour cream! |
Next: Salzburg Schloss Hellbrunn.
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