http://xtramsn.co.nz/travel/0,,8425-2343317,00.html
A snippet:
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Stretching along three miles of one of Germany's best beaches lies the biggest hotel the world never saw - a forbidding hulk of 10,000 rooms built by Adolf Hitler as a holiday camp to ready the masses for war.
World War Two started before he could finish the resort at Prora on the Baltic island of Ruegen. But the scale of what was completed illustrates Hitler's megalomania more forcefully than other famous surviving Nazi structures such as Berlin's Olympic stadium or the derelict site of the Nuremberg rallies.
Locals call it the "Colossus of Prora", now a crumbling concrete complex that stands deserted bar a few museums, a ramshackle cafe and a disco - a huge blight on a coast otherwise lined with upmarket, old-fashioned resorts.
"It was one of the biggest National Socialist building projects to be realised," said Uwe Schwartz, who works in a local museum about Prora. "Hitler planned to build five of them."
Prora was designed to provide cheap holidays for 20,000 people in one go and was part of the Nazis' "Kraft durch Freude" ("Strength Through Joy") programme - an early form of mass tourism.
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take special note:
why doesn't that surprise me?
and a shrewd and astute observation:
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The building is ugly and needs investment.
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Couldn't agree more [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]