By SIMON GARDNER L A F A L D A , Argentina, Nov. 18 200?
It was supposed to be a paradise on Earth, a luxury spa deep in the New World. But this fallen Eden is now in ruins — haunted by its past as an Argentine haven for Nazis and their supporters.
The Eden Hotel, famous before the end of World War II as a posh resort for Germans in central Argentina, is now an empty shell managed by the local municipality, which offers tours and is trying to restore it as a museum.
Wending his way through the ruins on one such tour, 33-year-old businessman Jose Ranz has come to learn of its ties to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and to unravel the mystery of his own family's past.
The resort was a magnet for the rich and famous early last century, luring Albert Einstein in 1925. But the heyday was short-lived and the hotel was plunged into disrepute and eventual ruin by the Nazi sympathies of its former owners.
The hotel is a haunting testament to the murky relationship Argentina shared with the Nazis, hundreds of whom flocked here after the war, drawn by the open-door policy of General Juan Domingo Peron, who had fascist sympathies.
"My grandfather told me this was once the only place you could contact Europe from," Ranz said, looking at the rooftop where a radio antenna connecting the hotel with Berlin once stood alongside an iconic eagle torn down after World War II.
That wasn't all he told him. His grandfather sat him down when he was 12 and confessed: He was not Spanish as he had maintained since he fled to Argentina in the 1930s; he was German.
"He told me what was good about Nazism and why it later became deformed," Ranz said, explaining his visit as part of an effort to decipher his grandfather's true sympathies.
"He explained why the Nazis hated Jews … I don't know if he escaped from Nazism, or if he escaped because he was a Nazi."
His grandfather lived nearby, often spoke of the hotel and socialized with the Germans who congregated around it.
Storied History
The hotel dates from 1897, the brainchild of a German hotelier, and passed into the hands of another German family, the Eichorns. The town of La Falda, a resort 450 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, evolved to service the hotel.
The Eden Hotel had its own 18-hole golf course, a fleet of Model T Fords, orchards, a ballroom decked out with oak imported from Slovenia and stairs hewn from Italian marble.
The old visitors' book is filled with Argentina's elite of the day.
Owners Walter and Ida Eichorn were fervent supporters of Hitler, and when Argentina declared war on Germany shortly before the fall of the Third Reich, the hotel was confiscated by the government as enemy property.
Nazi Spa
"The Eichorns were members of the National Socialist Party, and sent money for the Fuehrer's political campaign [in the 1930s]," said 22-year-old guide Ariel Manzani, who conducts tours of the hotel for the local tourism board.
"They celebrated his victories with parties at the hotel," added Manzani. "Their idea was to create a German colony here in Argentina."
Dozens of Alpine-style chalets are now clustered on land surrounding the hotel that the Eichorns sold off largely to German immigrants in the 1930s to help finance the operation.
After a string of ill-fated attempts to resurrect the hotel by successive owners, its doors finally shut in the 1960s. Years of neglect and looting followed, and the hotel's ramshackle shell now sits on just a fraction of the original 2,965 acres of grounds.
The municipality is trying to convince residents who came by the hotel's contents — from chandeliers to coffee cups that were auctioned off or looted over the years — to loan them back.
"The idea is to try and reclaim rooms of the hotel, like a museum and show what they would have looked like originally," said La Falda tourism chief Daniel Buonamico. "But I fear most of [the contents] have been lost."
Tales of the Führer
Ambrosio Vicente Farias, 85, recalls driving visitors to the hotel during the Eichorn era. "They all spoke German up there. I couldn't understand anything," he said. "They say Hitler himself visited once incognito."
At the hotel there are two faded sepia group photographs taken on the front steps. In both pictures, taken from different angles, one of the 60 or so faces is blurred beyond recognition. The shadow of small moustache is just discernible.
"Did Hitler ever come here?," Ranz asked his guide as he and his young family ended their tour.
"That's what some say," came the answer.
Fact about the Eden Hotel has blended with fiction in local lore and some townspeople have been reluctant to confront its past. Ranz and Manzani say it is time to put the record straight, for better or worse.
Part of it, at least, already has been.
"The local legend about a Hitler visit is just that: legend," said Hitler expert Professor Sir Ian Kershaw of Britain's Sheffield University.
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