'The hills are alive,' warbled Julie Andrews as she strode through a verdant Alpine mountain meadow, 'with the sound of music. With songs they have sung, for a thousand years.' But there was always a dark side to the peaks she sang about in The Sound of Music, and they have just claimed another victim.
This week Andreas Münzhuber, reportedly a leading German neo-Nazi, tripped on a root and plunged 200 feet to his death climbing on the Untersberg, a mountain massif straddling the German-Austrian border near the town of Berchtesgaden. The Untersberg is the actual mountain that Andrews was filmed singing on in the opening of The Sound of Music, and where the von Trapp family can be seen fleeing from Nazi Austria at the end of the film.
It seems unlikely that Münzhuber was in the region because of his love of musicals. According to a German news outlet, he was a 'senior board member' of the Third Way, a breakaway group from Germany's leading neo-Nazi party, the NPD (recently renamed Heimat! or 'Homeland'). The NPD was founded in the 1960s, around the time that The Sound of Music was filmed, and has been hovering on the fringes of German politics ever since.
It's a fair bet that Münzhuber was well aware of the mountain's chief associations with Adolf Hitler, who made the area his home exactly 100 years ago. In 1924, when he was released from jail after mounting Munich's unsuccessful Beer-hall putsch, he withdrew to the mountains to finish his autobiography Mein Kampf.
The future Fuhrer rented a chalet called Haus Wachenfeld, and he loved the place so much that after he came to power he bought the house in 1935 with Mein Kampf's royalties. He vastly expanded the site to create a residence called the Berghof (Mountain Court) which became the physical centre of the Nazi regime, and the site of pilgrimages by crowds of his adoring admirers, hoping to catch a glimpse of their revered leader. Other Nazi leaders, including Göring, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann, also acquired nearby houses, often by forcibly evicting the original residents.
The Berghof - patrolled by prowling SS guards, and ringed by fences and watchtowers - was the home where Hitler held court, and where he welcomed international visitors such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Prime Ministers David Lloyd George and Neville Chamberlain.
The Berghof was also where Hitler relaxed with his mistress Eva Braun, watched Hollywood films, made his own home movies, and planned his key decisions - like the fatal 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Apart from the heart-stoppingly beautiful scenery, another aspect of the area that most appealed to Hitler was its importance in Teutonic mythology.
The Untersberg, according to legend, is where emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the ruler of the First Reich, the Holy Roman Empire, sleeps in a hidden grotto, only to be roused from his eternal rest if Germany is in mortal peril. (The more mundane historical reality is that the real Barbarossa drowned in what is now Turkey while on the Third Crusade in 1190, and his mortal remains were divided amongst nearby local churches). 'Barbarossa' was also the codename Hitler chose for his ill-fated assault on Russia.
I know Berchtesgaden and the Untersberg well, as it was a stopover along the route of the 'Face of Evil', a tour I devised and led for ten years tracing the rise and fall of the Third Reich. While planning the tour, I was invited to a meeting with Berchtesgaden's nervous mayor, who wanted to impress upon me that the area's popularity with the thousands of visitors who flock there annually was wholly down to the beautiful scenery and fresh mountain air, and had nothing whatsoever to do with its unfortunate history in the years 1933-45.
The mayor's assurances were nonsense, of course. His eagerness to airbrush away the area's dark history was contradicted by the fine local museum, dedicated to the area's links with Hitler, built over a labyrinth of tunnels dug by the SS planning a last stand in this redoubt. It was also clear why hundreds of people flocked every day in the summer to the top of another mountain peak, the 6,000-foot Kehlstein, where Martin Bormann built a mountain top eyrie, the Eagle's Nest, as a 50th birthday present for his master.
Hitler disliked the Eagle's Nest, and only visited it a dozen times, though Eva Braun partied with her friends there when he was absent. Today the site is a restaurant, which can be accessed by Hitler's original lift. Visitors head up to the summit through the mountain's core and can dine in the SS's former guardroom.
The Berghof itself is no more. It was shattered by an Allied bombing raid in April 1945, and looted by its SS guardians. Its ruins were then destroyed by an embarrassed Bavarian government in 1951, and now only the massive foundations remain, hidden beneath the trees of a lowering forest.
Even so, Hitler's beloved home still attracts dedicated followers like Münzhuber. During one tour of the site, I actually found votive church candles burning there, placed by unseen devotees to whom Hitler is a hero, if not a saint. It is disturbing indeed that there are still those drawn here to worship the face of evil.