Germany Debates Whether to Rebuild, Erase or Reinterpret Hitler's Burned-Out Eagle's Nest

On the evening of 23 October, fire tore through the Kehlsteinhaus, the mountain retreat above Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps that the world knows as the Eagle's Nest. Police now describe the building as largely destroyed. What remains is a burned-out shell on a ridge at 1,834 metres, and an argument in Germany over what should become of it.

The Nazis built the house in 1938. Adolf Hitler and other senior Nazis used it, and so did their guests. After the war it was classified as a historical monument to the Nazi era. Unlike Hitler's nearby summer residence, the Berghof, which was bombed during the war and demolished in 1952, the Kehlsteinhaus survived. It is owned by the state of Bavaria and for many years ran as a restaurant. Visitors took a bus, then rode the original brass and mirror-panelled lift through the mountain, and ate sausages in the beer garden with the Alps spread out below. Tens of thousands came each season, an important source of income for the region.

The site has never been without a reckoning with its history. In the 1990s, amid concern that it did too little to confront Nazi crimes, the Obersalzberg Documentation Centre opened nearby. About 15 years ago a photo exhibit on the building's history was added inside the Kehlsteinhaus. The documentation centre came through the fire unscathed.

Authorities have not commented on a motive. A 33-year-old man with a history of mental illness is being held in a secure psychiatric hospital on suspicion of arson.

For some, the fire settles the question. Sir Richard J. Evans, a historian of Nazi Germany at the University of Cambridge, says the rubble should simply be cleared and the mountain left in its natural state. He points to other Nazi sites that were dealt with this way, including the Berlin bunker where Hitler killed himself, which was filled with concrete and topped with a children's playground. In his view the Kehlsteinhaus was a Nazi vanity project, later romanticised by the name Eagle's Nest.

Bavaria's government sees it differently. Interior minister Joachim Herrmann said a ruin cannot simply be left standing, and arts minister Markus Blume has also backed rebuilding. Blume told Bavarian radio that it must not cost taxpayers anything. Herrmann added that officials will seek a sensible solution in consultation with historians, given the building's complicated history.

Sven Keller, who heads the Documentation Centre, also opposes leaving a ruin, because neo-Nazi pilgrims could then hike up undisturbed. He told the BBC's Today programme that experience at Obersalzberg shows clearing sites does not remove them from people's mental maps, citing the Berghof's demolition in the 1950s. He does not think a one-to-one reconstruction is possible either.

Isabel Heinemann, professor of contemporary history at Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and head of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, argues for a middle path. Germany has an everlasting responsibility to deal with its Nazi past, she says, but fully rebuilding would put highly ideological architecture back in place. She proposes documenting the fire damage and the historical remains, then reconstructing parts in a modern design that shows the building's different layers of time.

The debate comes as the far-right AfD and the Austrian Freedom Party are on the rise, giving questions of remembrance, Erinnerungskultur, fresh urgency. In Saxony, AfD and conservative CDU councillors in one town recently voted to ban stumbling stones, the small brass plaques set into streets to honour Nazi victims. In Austria, a police station opened this summer in Hitler's birthplace in Braunau am Inn, after years of dispute; the government said the police presence would deter neo-Nazi pilgrims, while others wanted a centre confronting the past. A Braunau resident described the choice as a delicate balance between how much to remember and how much to forget.

No decision has been announced. Bavaria's officials favour rebuilding in some form, and the cost question and the pilgrimage risk will shape what they choose.