Chloe Paver writes:
There is only so much one can say about the Dokumentation Obersalzberg, which is a fairly run-of-the-mill information centre in a stunning setting.
The stunning setting is a good starting point. There are museums that can work with their site and museums that have to fight against it. Dachau, for instance, remains a barren, intimidating place, so that it isn’t hard to convince a visitor to feel serious there. By contrast, the mountain scenery at Obersalzberg makes one’s heart sing. Yet as the second most important seat of Nazi power the former Berghof complex was a place where a murderous ideology was developed and inhumane orders issued.
To complicate matters, some foreign tourists are attracted precisely by the relationship of the setting to Nazi power. Obersalzberg can still evoke a certain myth of Nazism as a folie de grandeur. This is helped by its distance from the scenes of Nazi crimes. Accordingly, it is the job of the documentation centre to anchor the visitor’s understanding of Obersalzberg in harsh historical fact.
Historian Markus Urban has traced the history of the site. For fifty years the area was in the hands of the American military. During this time, early forms of Third Reich tourism developed even though much of the original Berghof site was off limits, its buildings destroyed. When, in the 1990s, the US Army withdrew, the Bavarian regional government tried to wrest control of the historical narrative from the interests of commercial tourism. Markus Urban notes the tensions that arose in this process: in appointing the Munich-based Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History) to write texts for the documentation centre, the state of Bavaria sidelined a local, cross-party lobby group which had campaigned for a memorial and information centre at the site.
If that is the case, it is a familiar story: something similar happened at the Topf & Söhne factory site in Erfurt. Grass-roots pressure from ‘citizens’ initiatives’ (Bürgerinitiativen) is often the dynamic force that sets museum projects in motion, but the state usually invests taxpayers’ money in displays by professional historians.
Given that the website of the documentation centre includes the original call to arms by the lobby group, it cannot be said that the group have been airbrushed out of the story of the museum’s foundation. Writing in 1995, the group objected to the fact that the historical brochures on sale in tourist shops peddled a harmless picture of the Berghof as a family-friendly retreat for high-ranking Nazis. Such brochures also made no mention of the programme of compulsory purchase that allowed the Nazi elite to seal off a large area but deprived locals of land and property.
This point is interesting because the more usual objection of local protest groups is that a town or village is stubbornly refusing to remember the persecution of Jews and others. Though this lobby group made conventional statements along those lines, it also wanted to bring to light the fact that local people who did not belong to any of the persecuted groups had been harassed and disadvantaged by the Nazis. In doing so it was evidently motivated less by local self-pity than by a wish to highlight the moral shabbiness beneath the superficial gloss of the Berghof project.
Even supposing that some local goodwill was lost when the Institut für Zeitgeschichte was called in at Obersalzberg, it is unlikely that the citizens’ initiative would disagree with the content of the exhibition. The professional historians have worked hard to take any remaining sheen off the Berghof. Exhibition boards explain the forced sales of property and land, including confiscation from an owner of Jewish descent, and show that the supposedly ‘model’ farm set up at Obersalzberg by the Nazis was a loss-making operation which ignored local agricultural conditions and traditions.
The historians of the IfZ are, as one might hope, more cautious and fastidious than the lobby group. The latter had mentioned in their campaign statement that forced labour was used to build buildings at the Berghof (a fact, they claimed, that had since been hushed up). The historians qualify this: cheap German labour was used up to 1939; during the war foreign builders were drafted in. They lived under a strict disciplinary regime but were not forced labour. Only in the case of a renovation project for Heinrich Himmler were forced labourers from Dachau brought in for a short time.
If, by this stage, any visitor is still clinging to grand images of the Berghof, documents on display give an insight into the strictly controlled living conditions for prostitutes at the site. Motivated by the racist belief that foreign labourers should not sleep with German women, the Nazis brought in foreign prostitutes. The women were forced to put their earnings in a bank account but could not spend the money freely. The state gave itself the right to raid the accounts to claim damages from them.
Though the museum does not point it out, the language used in the documents is full of the double standards that were typical of the Nazis’ dealings with prostitutes. Each woman had to sign an agreement stipulating the circumstances under which ‘Gewerbeunzucht’ (illicit or unnatural sex for money) was allowed to take place. Thus, the Nazis were careful to use discriminatory language to describe what the prostitutes did, even as they required it of them. The final line of the work contract states that breaking house rules will lead to ‘preventive custody’ (‘Vorbeugehaft’). This was imprisonment without judicial process which often led to internment in a concentration camp. Officially, ‘Vorbeugehaft’ was used against ‘habitual criminals’, so prostitutes found themselves encouraged in state brothels to carry out their ‘crime’ repeatedly but classed as criminals without normal rights because of that same ‘habit’ of crime.
While I am no great fan of the ‘begehbares Buch’ or ‘book you can walk through’ (an exhibition format which uses information boards but no objects), even I will admit that the ‘book’ always contains information worth knowing.
German History Museums 