At Home With Hitler

The following article appeared in Homes & Gardens magazine in its November, 1938 issue. From wow.blogs.com:

Hitler’s Mountain Home
A visit to ‘Haus Wachenfeld’ in the Bavarian Alps, written and illustrated by Ignatius Phayre

Screenhunter_13_jul_17_2133It is over twelve years since Herr Hitler fixed on the site of his one and only home. It had to be close to the Austrian border, barely ten miles from Mozart’s own medieval Salzburg. At first no more than a hunter’s shack, “Haus Wachenfeld” has grown until it is to-day quite a handsome Bavarian chalet, 2,000 feet up on the Obersalsburg amid pinewoods and cherry orchards. Here, in the early days, Hitler’s widowed sister, Frau Angela Raufal, kept house for him on a “peasant” scale. Then, as his famous book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) became a best-seller of astonishing power (4,500,000 copies of it have been sold), Hitler began to think of replacing that humble shack by a house and garden of suitable scope. In this matter he has throughout been his own architect.

There is nothing pretentious about the Führer’s little estate. It is one that any merchant of Munich or Nuremberg might possess in these lovely hills.

More here.