Hotel Eden - The Story of a German Nazi Hotel in Argentina | Documentary, 1995

Jan 19, 2017 | In La Falda, a small town in central Argentina, you can see the ruin of a luxurious hotel, but nobody would assume that this hotel played the role in German history it did. The hotel founded in 1899 helped the region to prosper and later Hitler to come to power. In the twenties, the famous and rich like the poet Berta Singer, the dancer Isadora Duncan, and the scientist.

Albert Einstein stayed here, while the owners visited Europe and met Adolf Hitler. From 1929, the hotel supported the NSDAP and even after it was closed down in 1945, it was used as a hiding place for persecuted fascists.

Nowadays, within the community of La Falda, people are arguing what to do with the ruins. Some want to demolish it while others want to host a museum and a cultural centre in it.

The filmmaker Cuini Amelio Ortiz, born in La Falda and now living in Germany, tells the story of the hotel in a fictional and documentarian style, moving somewhere between legend and reality; showing that German history left its traces in South America and how the fate of the inhabitants of La Falda is knitted together to Hitler’s Germany.