The mayor of the eastern German seaside town of Binz, Dieter Reinhardt, believes he has found the key to his community's future - its grisly past. Binz is the biggest town on Ruegen, an island on the Baltic coast that boasts miles of white, sandy beaches and looks as if it has not changed at all since Christopher Isherwood set part of his Berlin stories here in the 1930s. Like the rest of eastern Germany, Ruegen has been struggling to develop a western-style tourist infrastructure since German reunification. When easterners won the right to travel abroad for the first time in 1989, many abandoned the bracing air of Ruegen for the scorching sands of Tenerife.
But seven years of hard work and massive investment have seen a marked improvement in the eastern tourist business, with the state of Saxony boasting a 21 per cent increase in business last year. A few problems remain, notably where professionalism and customer relations are concerned - service in many hotels and restaurants comes, if at all, with a snarl.
Reinhardt believes that Ruegen is about to steal a march on its rivals as soon as his plan, costing 800 million deutschmarks, is put into practice.
"I know it won't be difficult to attract investment. There's a queue of people waiting to put their plans into operation already," he said.
Reinhardt's scheme centres on Prora, a monumental structure on the island's coast which, at over four kilometres, is the world's longest building. Designed to accommodate 20,000 people for 10-day holidays as part of Hitler's "Strength Through Joy" programme, Prora was completed in 1937 but was prevented from opening by the outbreak of the second World War. The Red Army tried to demolish it after 1945 but the structure was too robust and the building was used as a training base for the East German National People's Army until 1990.
Now Reinhardt wants to transform it into a huge holiday complex with hotels, restaurants, an international conference centre and a water-sports park. The Nazis had high hopes when they planned Prora as Europe's first mass holiday resort in 1935. When the Nazi party organiser Richard Ley called a group of architects together to discuss the plan, he told them the idea came directly from Hitler himself and outlined how Prora should function.
"When the visitor arrives at the resort, he must forget the past immediately. I want to construct it in such a way that he enters into a bustle of music, dance and theatre that takes his breath away so that he forgets himself," he said.
HITLER was eager to use this Nazi version of Butlins to "strengthen the nerves" of the German people, partly because of his belief that Germany lost the first World War because it lost its nerve. Reinhardt's critics complain that, by putting Prora the centre of his grand scheme and restoring its original function as a holiday resort, he is granting Hitler a posthumous victory. Udo Knapp, a local Social Democrat politician, views the project with horror and believes the building should be demolished.
"I want to get rid of this Nazi monstrosity to let the island breathe again, in terms of tourism and history," he says. The mayor dismisses such objections and is unmoved by complaints that Prora is already a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis. He points to a recent opinion poll showing that 1450 of the islanders were in favour his scheme, compared with only 50 who opposed it.
"The citizens of Ruegen are generally in favour of keeping the building and using it, as opposed to some voices elsewhere in Germany who want to tear it down. We don't agree that you can come to terms with the past by demolishing buildings. "The people of this island have no problem with the past," he adds. "They don't see it as a burden but as an opportunity."
