Police in Bavaria detained a suspect after a fire broke out Friday night at the Kehlsteinhaus, Adolf Hitler's former Alpine mountain retreat known as the Eagle's Nest, with roughly 200 emergency personnel still battling the blaze into early Saturday.
Dispatchers in Traunstein received a fire alarm from the building at 9:15 p.m. local time Friday, and firefighters arrived to find it engulfed in flames; difficult mountain terrain hampered efforts to put the fire out, and it was still burning early Saturday. No injuries were reported. A criminal investigation is underway to determine whether the detained suspect is connected to the fire's cause.
Completed by the Nazi regime in 1938, the Kehlsteinhaus sits above the town of Berchtesgaden and survived the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945. Hitler used it as a part-time seat of government, meeting commanders there to plan the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, and as a backdrop for propaganda films portraying him as an animal lover. It has since become a tourist attraction housing a mountain inn, and its official website describes it as serving as "a cautionary reminder of the abysses of the inhumane Nazi dictatorship."
The fire adds a fresh chapter to an already fraught debate in Germany and Austria over what to do with buildings tied to Hitler and the Nazi regime. Berlin announced in June that it would demolish one of Hitler's bunkers, once described as "the power centre of Nazi Germany," to build housing and offices on the site, over objections from those who argued it held historical value worth preserving as a museum. In July, Austrian authorities took the opposite approach with the house in Braunau am Inn where Hitler was born, converting it into a police station specifically to strip the building of any value as a site of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.