'Hitler's Resort' Now Hot Property

Almost 80 years after Adolf Hitler picked a design for a massive seaside resort for weary German workers to recharge their batteries, the Prora complex is finally popular. The mammoth Nazi-era complex on a Baltic Sea island is being redeveloped into apartments and hotels—and with the German property market heating up, buyers seem willing to ignore its tainted past, reports the Wall Street Journal. "I am happy to see that this building is being made into nice vacation apartments. It was always ruins," a buyer who plans to move in this fall tells the Journal. "The buildings were built in a dark, bad time. Now they are being transformed."

The Nazis put the project on hold in 1939 and the complex, designed to accommodate 20,000 people, was used by the Soviet Union and the German military after the war before being left to decay for years. The transformation comes amid a wider redevelopment of Nazi-era buildings into residential properties, and although it has been dubbed "Hitler's resort," developers dismiss controversy around the Prora project. It was "always about tourism, so it doesn't have such a negative history," the director of one of the site's developers tells the Guardian, which notes that since the property has been deemed historic, the German government is subsidizing sales. (Archaeologists say they've unearthed a Nazi hideout deep in a South American jungle.)