A Luxury Tour of Hitler’s Old Haunts, Now Accepting Reservations

By Michael Kaminer July 5, 2011

There’s nothing like a carefree luxury vacation where you visit Dachau, eat a Bavarian dinner at the beer hall where Hitler unveiled the 25-point Nazi party program, and drop by Wannsee, the elegant lakeside residence where the Holocaust was planned.

At least that’s the idea behind Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: The Face of Evil, an eight-day, $3,200 “historical tour” which “covers the entire sobering story of Nazi Germany — from the Nazi party’s birth in the smoky beerhalls of 1919 Munich to the Third Reich’s protracted death, amidst the ruins and despair of 1945 Berlin,” according to the website of U.K. tour operator Historical Trips.

The itinerary made its debut last summer — and was greeted by stories labeling it a “Hitler Holiday,” according to the Financial Times. British historian David Cesarani also told the UK Daily Star last year that “there is a danger of sensationalism. If you focus on the sites most pertinent to Hitler, you are concentrating on the cult of that personality. Then the trip in effect becomes a perverse pilgrimage.”

The 2011 itinerary cheerfully begins with arrival in Munich — “the ancient capital of Bavaria and the city christened by Hitler as the ‘cradle of the Nazi movement’” — and provides time to relax before “our introductory drinks party.” After breakfast on Sunday, “we travel by coach to Dachau.” And Monday brings lunch at the Eagle’s Nest, the mountaintop lair “conceived and built by Hitler’s factotum, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, as a luxurious gift to mark Hitler’s 50th birthday on April 20th 1939,” the company’s site enthuses.

The company is now accepting bookings for summer 2012 its web site says.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO