Infamous property for sale

Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair in English) is a place that still casts a dark shadow on the events of human history. It was the only place Adolph Hitler felt really safe during the height of World War II. He spent half his time (more than 800 days) there in bunkers and buildings with 8-foot thick walls.

Today, it is up for sale by the local forestry authority in what was formerly East Prussia before post war border shifts made the area part of Poland.

It was at this infamous site that decisions were made about the attack plans on the eastern front and about the construction of new death camps like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Trelinka and 40 others constructed by slave labor and scattered about in Nazi occupied Poland. It was also at the Wolf’s Lair that murderous decisions were made regarding the fate of many war torn nations of Europe.

Among those who resided and worked at the Lair were: Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goring, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Wilhelm Keitel, Joseph Goebbels, Dr. Fritz Todt, Albert Speer and others.

The now shambled fortress in the very heart of the northern eastern Mazurian forests near present day Kętrzyn, Poland (then known as Rastenburg, East Prussia) is legendary for being the site of an assassination attempt on Hitler by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. Most recently the briefcase bomb event was popularized in the 2008 film “Valkyrie” starring Tom Cruise former husband to Toledo’s own Katie Holmes.

The bomb went off just a few feet away from Hitler, but the Nazi madman survived.

Though people have rambled through the remains of the fortification located on public lands for decades and sometimes with hired tour guides, Poland is now looking for an investor to turn the "Wolf's Lair" of der Führer into a tourist attraction.

The remaining ruins were open to the public until this past January, but did not attract many visitors because they are hidden deep in a forest and accessible only by treacherous dirt roads.

The site – whose name refers to Hitler's nickname, "Mr. Wolf" – consists of a hidden town in the woods containing nearly 200 buildings including shelters, barracks, 2 airports, a power station, a railway station, air-conditioners, water supplies, heat-generating plants and other structures for self sufficient operations. A minefield of immense size that surrounded the complex took Poles more than ten years to clear after the war.

The original intent for the complex built in 1940 was to act as a combat operations center and fortified shelter to protect Hitler and other top Nazi officials from air bombardment during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union known as Operation Barbarossa.

The Lair held many secrets concerning war atrocities. In 1945, toward the end of the war when Russian divisions were advancing on the complex deep in the sheltered woodlands, the German’s themselves used an unfathomable amount of explosives to destroy every fortified structure and thick walled bunker.

The local forestry official Zenon Piotrowicz said, “"We are waiting for offers, but so far we have none”.

"The requirements are quite high because we want a new leaseholder to invest a lot, particularly in a museum with an exhibition that could be open all year long."

Although the Polish real estate market is not as nearly depressed as those in Western Europe and the United States, the Wolf’s Lair still might be a very tough sale to make.