Doubts shroud plans for Hitler holiday camp

Even by the standards of Nazi monumentalism and social engineering, the plan was ambitious. Every block would have its own restaurant, catering for 2,500 people per meal, divided into two sittings. Every week, 20,000 workers from the industrial powerhouses of Nazi Germany would be brought to Prora under a programme called Strength Through Joy to prepare themselves mentally and physically to fulfil Hitler's dreams.

With some justification, people still call the five surviving blocks - strung along a pristine, sandy beach - the Colossus of Prora.

Now the question for Germany is what do you do with a Nazi relic that is too big and too laden with symbolism to destroy, but too enormous to be easily put to use?

The complex, on the island of Rugen in the former Communist East Germany, seems to reflect the cautious way in which Germans are slowly loosening the bonds of guilt mooring them to a past.

"Of course we cannot forget it," said Peter Spiekermann, 48, a holiday-maker cycling among the apartment blocks, referring to Germany's history. "But we can't go around atoning forever."

The links to the past are complicated by the postwar history of division, when new rulers took over the complex, which is nearly three miles long, to house soldiers - first from the Soviet Red Army, then the East German National People's Army.

That, too, produced its share of pain, particularly among a small group of East Germans who used a little-known law permitting them to object to military service and were sent to Prora as "construction soldiers" - in essence, conscientious objectors carrying shovels instead of Kalashnikov rifles.

Horst Schaumann, the mayor of the nearby spa resort of Binz, said "the past plays a somewhat lesser role" in the way restaurateurs and hoteliers contemplate their colossal neighbour after years of inconclusive efforts to define its place in modern Germany. "Life must return to Prora," Schaumann said. "We have to have people living there."

Thus, perhaps incongruously, a 400-bed youth hostel - "Europe's biggest," the mayor said - is to open next month, occupying a part of Block 5, where thousands of construction soldiers were once billeted.

Further south, German investors have won zoning permission to build 3,000 accommodation and holiday apartments in Blocks 1 and 3, although, in straitened financial times, the source of financing is not yet clear, Schaumann said.

If major renovations do start, Prora could find itself seized by a somewhat less dramatic version of the mass tourism Hitler sought to create. That, too, stirs unease among some.

"We should not be following in the footsteps of Strength Through Joy," said Jurgen Rostock, the director of an exhibit in Block 4 called "Macht Urlaub" - a play on words that, in German, can mean either an order ("Go on vacation!") or a concept ("power vacation").

"We think this is a very important monument to the social history of the Third Reich," Rostock said. "It explains why the Germans were seduced by the Third Reich. This was an offer to them."

And, he said, it was something more sinister. "It was a very self-serving project to condition the people for war," Rostock said.

In its dimensions, Prora ranks with the Nazi Party rallying ground in Nuremberg as an awkward leftover.

Hitler himself was photographed alongside Clemens Klotz, the architect who designed Prora, inspecting the designs, although Hitler never visited the site.

In fact, the project never measured up to the grandiose Nazi dream. As war broke out in 1939, Prora remained unfinished, rising like a gray phalanx along the coast, roofed but without windows or other fittings. And so the complex stayed until the postwar division of Germany, when the new Communist landlords completed its construction and put it to use. Strength Through Joy had sunk under the weight of war.

That chronology, in fact, underpins the contest between those who regard Prora primarily as a narrative of the Third Reich and those who argued that since the Nazis never made use of it, "above all, Prora is a story of East Germany".

While the Nazi era may seem remote to many Germans born after the war, baby boomers from the former East Germany grew up under Communist rule and resent comparisons to the Nazi era. Some of the tens of thousands of Germans who visit the complex each year raise a fundamental question: Why not just knock it down? Ingrid and Klaus Berlin, cycling near the derelict Block 1, said they had not been able to agree on an answer.

Klaus Berlin, 56, said he found it fascinating to realise that "a man could lead people in this way, that they could manipulate people like this."

But Ingrid, 55, differed: "Why does this beautiful landscape have to suffer under a sight like this?" she said.