Guess who's building Jewish retirement home?

The Czech branch of Hochtief, Germany's largest construction company, started building the 200 million koruna (USD 8.89 million; -7.02 million) retirement home last month and plans to complete it within 18 months. The facility will accommodate some 60 clients and will include a medical center and a day care center.

While the decision to hire Hochtief may trouble some, the head of Prague's Jewish community, Frantisek Banyai, seems not to be worried by the past of the company - even though it built the very bunker in which Hitler killed himself on April 30, 1945.

"We did not examine these things, " Banyai told The Associated Press. "We opened a tender and they gave us the best price. " He said he negotiated only with the company's Czech branch and does not expect the German headquarters to get involved.

Hochtief AG acquired the Czech subsidiary in 2002. The Czech branch is currently working on a multi-million-dollar contract from the Czech government, reconstructing several government buildings in Prague.

In the past, Hochtief also worked on Nazi Germany's "Westwall" line of defenses and later on the "Atlantic Wall" in northern France.

It built Hitler's Bavarian Alpine retreat, called the Berghof and constructed his "Wolf's Lair" command headquarters in Rastenburg, then in Eastern Prussia, now Poland. The company also admitted to having used slave labor during World War II. Hochtief's Czech office had no immediate comment.

'Unfortunate choice'

Tomas Jelinek, former chairman of the Prague Jewish community, considers the choice of the construction firm unfortunate.

"There is no problem with Hochtief getting contracts from the Czech government 60 years after the war," Jelinek said. "But it seems strange that 60 years after the war, it can build a Jewish retirement home without even mentioning its own past."

"There is a lack of sense for historical circumstances in it, lack of feeling for the victims," he added. Banyai, however, said he does not expect the future clients of the retirement home - mostly Holocaust survivors - to complain. Times have changed, he said, noting that Germany's Volkswagen AG now makes the popular Czech Skoda sedans and if the wartime past were to be unreasonably invoked.

"The survivors could not drive even a Skoda car." He cited the maker of anti-graffiti coating for the Berlin's Holocaust Memorial, Degussa AG - a company that co-owned the maker of poison gas for the Nazis - as an example of the shift. 

Nearly 120,000 Jews lived on Czech territory before World War II. 80,000 did not survive the Holocaust. Today, the Czech Republic has only a tiny Jewish community of several thousand.