Nazi Past Haunts Argentina's Fallen Eden Hotel

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LA FALDA, Argentina (Reuters) - 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. 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.
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