Douglas Mercer
September 5 2023
In Germany they are getting squared away for the big grand opening of the Himmler Hotel. It’s not what you wish for of course, it’s not a shrine and a nostrum where all his greatest deeds are enumerated, how from ground up he created the SS as racially pure organization, requiring new applicants to submit proof of their Aryan purity back to 1650; not how he lectured the troops that this was a war for final victory, and how they thus needed to overcome the soapy sentimentality of an outworn Christianity and become steeled and hard for the road ahead; not how he built up the research institute called the Ahnenehrbe and sent the best anthropologists, folklorists, philologists, and historians in the world in search of the history and heritage of the Aryans—and the very source of their being; not how he said the inner German law which protected the community would transcend Western criminal law dedicated to the protection of the criminal. No, none of that, that’s for sure. Instead the self-loathing proprietor will seek a pass from the Jews by enlisting Jewish help and making the place a paean to tolerance and love. Which is a bit like showing up on the mountain top hoping to find the glorious eternal truth of our people and being handed a tote bag full of a crock of shit.
“Heinrich Himmler’s Bavarian lakeside villa has been turned into a hotel and restaurant which its owner wants to turn into a center of peace and inclusion, possibly with Jews on the management board. Himmler, head of the SS and chief architect of the Holocaust used the luxurious villa, acquired in 1934, beside the picturesque Tegernsee Lake as a holiday home and meeting place for fellow senior Nazis. The building dates back to 1892, and sits in a 20,000-sq piece of land. After 1933, when Hitler seized power, the region around the Tegernsee valley became a popular resort for high-ranking Nazis, including propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann, and other influential figures.”
What a paradise that was. The lakeside retreat where the real masters of the universe relaxed, met and mingled. After the war many lies were told about this paradise: some said that Hitler would keep his guests up all night and his interminable talk bored them silly. Albert Speer went so far to say that the atmosphere around Hitler and his entourage was stale and cold. But what would it have meant to listen to Hitler discourse and hold court? To hear the private thoughts and candid opinions of that greatest of men? Even Speer’s wife chastised her husband telling him that she had lost everything and now he wanted to take away her past. And you can see why the Jews are up in arms about this Himmler Hotel. You can dress it up in the borrowed clothing of a senescent ideology but try as you might the building as it was stands; the memories are present; and the greatness and the glory will still shine through. Even the casual guest will feel, amidst the obligatory shudder of horror, a sense of awe.
“The property, 30 miles south of Munich, was recently converted into a Blyb, a combined hotel/ restaurant. Owner Florian Zibert wants it to be a center of peace, tolerance and inclusion. Zibert said he would like to involve a wide range of people in deciding the future of the building. Eventually we would like to form a kind of advisory board made up of people from the Jewish community, people of color, people from very different backgrounds, people who live here and elsewhere, he said. It may be that no one from the Jewish community would like to be involved, he said, given how sensitive all this is, and I can respect that. I can also totally understand that for some people it feels inappropriate and insensitive that we are now running a hotel and restaurant at a place where Heinrich Himmler once lived. We did not enter into it lightly.”
And so he pays the Jewish toll though, you’ll see, it’s not going to be near enough. This is Germany after all, a country which has made it a national pastime to tuck one’s tail between one’s legs and leave the field of battle. And it goes without saying that if you are going to put up a Himmler Hotel you are going to have to do a lot of backpedaling mitigation, will have to put a lot of effort into showing that you are on the right-thinking side of history. In fact to even get the show on the road you will have to make sure that you make it loud and clear to one and all that this new project will be dedicated to the exact opposite of what its former and illustrious owner stood for. No whiff of the great man must be lingering about the place; not even a neutral description of it history, and certainly no lightning bolt pins or brown shirts, or the Victrola playing the Hosrt Wesel song. The board or advisory committee must be made up of some African lowlifes, a mixed race hermaphrodite with a horribly cleft palate, a reeking Turkish kebab vendor, at least one of those spear chucking Eritreans who run riot at the drop of a spear, a transitioned mother of three gender fluid question marks and, if they can possibly scrounge them up and mollify then enough, perhaps a Jews or two to round out the mixed race and mixed up mélange. And of course the Jew will be the one that they need the most, and heed the most, because when you open up the Hotel Himmler you might as well call it the SS Inn and even if you have a one legged obese Witch Doctor from the most squalid and sordid spot in Senegal who lives off the government dime that would not quell the kvetching from the criminal tribe. They’d take to the pages of their own newspapers and say what you were really doing was glorifying a “dark chapter” with a kind of kitschy and hazy nostalgia for the way things might have been.
“But a Jewish community leader criticized the development. Sacha Stawski, chairman of the German-Israeli Congress, said the building should have been turned into a memorial or museum educating the public about Himmler’s atrocities. Sacha Stawski attacked the new development in trenchant terms: Ever wanted to know what it feels like to eat hummus in Himmler’s dining room? Well, now you can. In most countries, a responsible handling of a historic site like this would have meant building a memorial or museum, which educates about the atrocities committed by a vile man like Himmler.”
These Jews and their memorials and museums, they never stop do they? They won’t be happy until the entire world is an outdoor shrine to their victimhood, with stumbling stones every twenty feet across the earth, and statues of emaciated figures in striped pajamas in every strip mall, every open field and in every civic space. They’d like to take over the Himmler Hotel, clear out the rooms and make them shrines to Jewdom, a room with holographic Holocaust images, a room made to look like showers to startle the visitor, a room with the idyllic pictures of the mementos of what life was like for Jews in Europe “before Hitler,” a room which shows the railway grid which brought them to their destined doom, a room with a desk of one of those “desk killers” to show the clinical and cold nature of the perpetrators of their destruction. And at the end as a kind of gratuitous fare-thee-well a room with sad images of modern refugees in the American Southwest and in Africa to remind the visitor that the plague of “Nazism” always haunts the world. That is they want it not to be the Hotel Himmler but the Hotel Holocaust which, like the proverbial Roach Motel, the unwary traveler enters but can never leave, at least in his mind.
“Yet here in Germany in 2023 you may stand by the history of your property, including mentioning on your website that a slave laborer died while building Himmler’s personal bunker, and do everything possible to bring back the authentic beauty of the original setting of this once impressive refuge of one of the worst Nazi figures. It’s not talk about the horrible crimes Himmler planned out while sitting in his romantic garden. Instead, let’s invite guests to sit on Himmler’s original park bench and enjoy the lake view sunset. What next? Should we build a rollercoaster ride in Dachau.”
The Jews have their virtual video games of their near demise, down in Southern Florida near Disney World they are right at home with their own Shoah theme park filled with infamous Holocaust Holograph images and the visitor to the exhibits can virtually interact with a long dead Jew and bring him to life and have him tell you how he once heard the screams. But let the Jews have their memorials and their museums, their sacred underground storage centers where they hoard the Holocaust, let them even have their heavily guarded and heavy handed storehouse of National Socialist Art at an American Army Fort; let them even have the Hotel Himmler, let them encase their made up suffering in amber for eternity, let them let their establishment approved lackeys write their blubs on plaques which are strategically placed by curators next to the shoes and the hair for maximum mental carnage. This is all supposed to send a chill down the viewer’s spine but in the end these perpetual paeans to the virtual dead are nothing more than the last evanescent wisps of a dead ideology. They have taken our shrines and our heroes and our statues and taken them down. But all their desperate efforts amount to nothing more than a rearguard action. Let them sniff around the graveyards of their purported pain and feverishly foist it on the world, no matter---tomorrow belongs to us. For what fascism is is not the fond hope for what might have been, or could have been, or what nearly was---fascism is not a peeing back into the backward abysm of time---fascism is nostalgia for the future. So should you ever book a room at the Hotel Himmler don’t pay too much attention to the modern furnishings, or the warning signs, or the cozy feel of a quintessentially German gemutlichkeit. Instead beside the lake remember those heroes of old but don’t be wistful for what might have been but be proud and expectant for what you know will be.
