Guests placed in basement cells
Photo: AFP
Former Nazi jail hosts 'prison parties'
Hotel in Germany, once POW prison, offers guests striped t-shirt, prison food, and dose of humiliation
BERLIN – A small hotel in rural Germany is offering its guests "prison parties" as a tribute to its bloody past as a Nazi detention center for prisoners of war.
According to historian Bernhard Gelderblom, some 474 people died at the hotel in Hameln, of starvation, diseases, forced labor, or simple execution.
Now owners of the hotel are being criticized for offering guests parties that treat them to a taste of the humiliation suffered there by prisoners during World War II.
For just 44 euros, guests receive a striped black-and-white t-shirt, prison food, and a dose of maltreatment by employees dressed as prison guards.
The party, which lasts around four hours, begins with a lineup of two rows and then a march to the prison cells in the hotel's basement. Managers stress that the guests must arrive "clean" and in "modest dress".
But the unusual offer has many locals steaming, and the hotel's managers have reported receiving numerous letters of complaint.
After World War II the hotel was seized by British troops, who used it to execute Nazi criminals. In the post-war years the building lay in ruins, and in the 1990's was sold for the symbolic price of one Deutschemark. Its purchasers vowed to rebuild the structure and turn it into a hotel.
The town of Hameln is known not only for the quirky hotel and its Nazi-era past, but also as the origin of the tale 'The Pied Piper of Hameln'.
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