Hitler and Nazi Resurgence

‘Serious’ Hitler package tour causes controversy
By Eliot Sefton

Historians are divided over plans for a luxury, eight-day package tour of sites relating to Adolf Hitler, with some saying it will turn into a "perverse pilgrimage".

The trip, scheduled for June, will visit the Munich beer cellar where the future Fuhrer launched his ill-fated 1923 putsch, Berchtesgaden where Hitler had his 'Eagle's Nest' castle and Berlin where he committed suicide.

The tour's British organizers - historians and writers - are at pains to point out that they are well-intentioned. Nigel Jones, author of Countdown to Valkyrie and other works, said yesterday: "We are serious historians with a track record."

He said efforts would be made to ensure that the punters forking out £2,000 for 'Face of Evil: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' are not neo-Nazis.

"Just to make sure, we will even phone all the people wanting to come on the tour about their motives and interest," said Jones.

Also taking part in the trip is Roger Moorhouse, author of Killing Hitler and Berlin at War. Both men will be delivering lectures as the tourists visit the Reich Chancellery bunker, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and Berlin's Holocaust memoria.

Dissent came from historian David Cesarani, who told the Sunday Times: "There is a danger of sensationalism...

"If you focus on the sites most pertinent to Hitler, you are concentrating on the cult of that personality. The trip in effect becomes a perverse pilgrimage."

Assuming the trip goes ahead in June, organizers would be wise to assume there are undercover journalists among their clients: last year, controversial British historian David Irving was stung by an Italian newspaper.

Corriere della Sera sent a reporter in disguise on a trip around concentration camps in Poland, led by Irving. He reported Irving as saying Hitler was "a great man" who was "not immoral" and adding that the Gestapo were "fabulous".