Nazk Mega Weapons: The Eagle’s Nest (Darlow Smithson Productions, PBS, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Wednesday, March 31 was a sort of “Nazi Night” on San Diego’s publilc broadcasting TV station, KPBS. After the weird National Geographic documentary Hitler’s Jurassic Monsters – which was billed as an attempt by the Nazis to reconstruct prehistoric animals by selectively breeding their extant descendants (but was actually about attempts to restore species that, though extinct, didn’t count as prehistoric: the aurochs, the giant cattle the Nazis particularly wanted to create as big game for sport hunting by Hermann Goering and other Nazi bigwigs, are described in Julius Caesar’s chronicles a bit over 2,000 years ago) they showed a 2016 episode of a quirky series called Nazi Mega Weapons. This series started running on British television in 2014 and was originally about what its title says – the enormous (and, ironically, highly impractical) tanks, cannon and other big armaments Adolf Hitler commissioned from his weapons designers and the arms factories that employed them, including a man named Ferdinand Porsche whose last name you’ve probably heard of. One running theme of Nazi Mega Weapons was that many of these projects actually helped Hitler and the Nazis lose the war, first because they were impractical (like the cannon that had to be towed wherever it was supposed to be used on two railroad cars, which made it a sitting duck for Allied bombers, or Porsche’s huge tank, ironically called the “Mouse,” which was so big that in order to cross water it had to have another Mouse behind it pushing it), and second because the Allied countries, the U.S. and Russia in particular, concentrated on building smaller, more practical weapons and building more of them.

By the third season the focus of the show had shifted to Nazi buildings and fortifications, and by now it’s little more than an umbrella title for documentaries about World War II, including ones about the Japanese that have little or nothing to do with Hitler. This epsiode of Nazi Mega Weapons was called “The Eagle’s Nest” and dealt with the combination fortress, villa and bunker complex Marton Bormann, probably the least known anbd most enigmatic of all the top Nazis, commissioned a huge complex there hoping it would please Hitler and move Bormann up in the Nazi hierarchy. The reason Bormann remains the most enigmatic of Hitler’s major associates was he preferred it that way: while other big Nazis like Goering, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler took on major projects and made themselves known to the German people, Bormann worked in the shadows and derived his main power from controlling, or seeking to control, other people’s access to Hitler. Bormann is also an enigma because for many years no one knew what had become of him after the war; until his remains were found in 1972. Bormann was widely believed to have escaped the ruins iof Berlin at the end of World War II and attempted to recruit enough surviving Nazis and loyal soldiers to stage a “Last Redoubt,” an attempt to continue the war and the Nazi regime somewhere after the overall defeat. Actually he had poisoned himself with a cyanide capsule on May 2, 1945.

Bormann had risen though the Nazi ranks to become “Private Secretary to the Führer,” and it’s not surprising that since his remains were discovered right at the start of the Watergate scandal he was sometimes referred to as “Hitler’s Haldeman,” after the chief of staff who had similarly controlled access to Richard Nixon during Nixon’s first term as President. Adolf Hitler had fallen in love with the Obersalzberg, the mountainous region of southeastern Germany, when his friend and mentor Dietrich Eckart invited him there in 1923, just before the failed Beer Hall Putsch – Hitler’s early attempt to grab power through revolutionary means, whose failure convinced him to take the slower, more patient approach of sabotaging the Weimar Republic from within and achieving power through ostensibly legal, constitutional means. In 1928, as Hitler began to accumulate money from the royalties on sales of his book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), Hitler began first to rent property in the area and then, after he became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and could therefore order German people to buy his book (by 1936 it had become a staple at German weddings; if you wanted to get married in Germany you had to document that you were of pure “Aryan” descent and buy a copy of Mein Kampf, the sort of wedding presentation for which the Bible had previously been used), to buy.

Eventually Bormann hit on the idea of building a huge villa on top of the Obersalzberg mountain called the “Eagle’s Nest,” and for its construction he requisitioned the top architectural engineers in Germany and every skilled construction worker he could lay his hands on. (Unlike a lot of Nazi infrastructure projects, this does not appear to have been built by slave labor, perhaps because the skill level involved in building it was beyond the poor, pathetic wretches the Nazis usually conscripted as slave laborers before killing them in the Holocaust once they’d extracted every atom of labor power out of them.) The road to the Eagle’s Nest was as extravagant as the building itself: it was over a mile long and it wound its way up almost sheer mountainsides, requiring major engineering feats. Bormann originally scheduled the road to go up the north face of the Obersalzberg but then, with the road about one-tenth completed, changed his mind and had it run up the south face instead. Ironically, though the Obersalzberg was richly appointed with the sort of luxurious trappings the Nazis demanded in all their estates – including giant picture windows with fantastic views of the Alps in Hitler’s native Austria (one of the attractions of the Obersalzberg to Hitler was its closeness to the Austrian border, a political division Hitler erased when he annexed Austria in 1938).

Hitler mainly used it for formal meetings with heads of state from other countries, but didn’t like staying there much because it was too remote; though it gave him a rest from the task of actually running Germany from Albert Speer’s spectacular Chancellery in Berlin (until Allied air raids virtually destroyed it in the final stages of the war in 1945), it also kept him from the “team of rivals” he had assembled in his government. A lot of nonsense has been written about power struggles within the Nazi hierarchy and allegedly competing “centers of power” in Hitler’s regime. There was only one center of power in Adolf Hitler’s Germany – Hitler himself – and while there certainly were faction fights within the Nazi hierarchy, they weren’t the sorts of factions that emerge within a democratic or republican government. Rather, they were more like a royal court in the Middle Ages: various factions attempting to gain the support of the all-powerful king by sucking up to his vanities and playing to his paranoia. The Nazi administrative system was bewilderingly complex – belying the claim of supporters of the idea of dictatorship in the 1930’s and 1940’s that it was more efficient than democracy because centering power in just one man would supposedly create quicker and more effective decisions than subjecting them to the vagaries of parliaments or congresses – and it’s clear from the historical record that Hitler wanted it that way. He wanted subordinates who were too busy fighting each other to unite against him, and it’s indicative of how well he succeeded that so many different people (Goering, Himmler, Bormann and even the unfortunate Rudolf Hess, among others) have been claimed to be “Hitler’s second-in-command.”

Like most dictators, Hitler didn’t want to designate a “second-in-command” for fear that person would depose him and try to become first in command. One of the most interesting aspects of the “Eagle’s Nest” program was the huge network of underground tunnels and bunkers Bormann created so the Nazis could be secure from any Allied air attack on the Eagle’s Nest and, at least theoretically, so the Nazis could continue the war even if Berlin fell. Always conscious of the fact that the essence of his power lay in his physical proximity to Hitler, Bormann built the bunkers and the tunnels that linked them so that his bunker had a direct route to Hitler’s while Goering’s was blocked from Hitler’s by 10 feet of solid mountain rock. As the war was drawing to a close and it was clear to just about everyone in the Nazi hierarchy that Germany was going to lose, Bormann tried to get Hitler to move to the Obersalzberg and install himself there to continue to lead the nation, but Hitler surprised Bormann by announcing his intention to stay in Berlin and meet his fate – either victory or death – in the capital. Today most of the Obersalzberg is a ruin – it was bombed by the Allies in the latter stages of the war, partly to kill Hitler if he had been there and partly to deny ikt as a sanctuary for any Nazi resistance afterwards – and what survived the war was mostly blown up by the West German government after the war, along with a lot of other Nazi sites, out of fear that neo-Nazis would turn the surviving relics of the Third Reich into pilgrimage sites and use them to help organize a Nazi revival. What remains is a reception building that’s become – of all things – a teahouse catering to curious tourists wanting to explore one of Hitler’s darkest and most bizarre lairs.