Adolf Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair in Masuria (5,679 km)

(2022-05-27/29) With its more than 2,000 lakes, the Masurian Lake District is one of the most impressive landscapes I have ever seen. While many of the lakes are accessible and developed for tourism, the forests in the region are off-limits to civilians as military areas; clearly, the border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is only 38 km away. Have you ever noticed that the military often seizes the most beautiful landscapes as military training areas, barracks sites, missile launching bases, etc.?

This was also the case for Adolf Hitler, who had the Wolf's Lair built here as the first Führer Headquarters on the Eastern Front. On Feb. 11, 1942, Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu (center, saluting) visited Hitler at the Wolf's Lair. The talks focused on the support Antonescu hoped to receive from Hitler against the Iron Guard in Romania. In return, Antonescu was a willing executioner of Nazi German warfare and the Holocaust against the Jews.

Read more: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1003365

We remember that Antonescu's visit in February 1942 fell exactly between the two waves of deportations from Czernowitz in October 1941 and in June 1942. The battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1943/1943 was not yet lost, and the failed and anyway much too late assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 was still far away.