The title alone probably made more than a few people scratch their heads. What was this bloke talking about, claiming to have stayed at Carinhall? Everyone knows Carinhall was blown sky-high in 1945. Did the channel have some new gimmick going, some kind of Felton goes camping affair?
Not at all. The truth is I spent a very comfortable night in a building that was built on the personal orders of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and still stands today in perfect condition, completely overlooked in the demolitions of April 1945. Far more of Göring’s Carinhall survives than anyone generally supposes, and I’m going to show you exactly what’s left. Before we get to that, though, a quick history lesson about the big house itself.
Back in 1933, Göring was appointed Minister-President of Prussia, and he had his heart set on a hunting lodge in the Schorfheide, the great forest stretch north of Berlin. His first choice was Hubertusstock, a fine lodge built for King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia back in 1849. Trouble was, the owner in 1933 was the exiled Emperor Wilhelm II, living over in the Netherlands, and he flatly objected to Göring getting his hands on it. So Göring cast around for another parcel of land, and Hitler gifted him forest around a lake called the Großdöllnsee.
The new house, named Carinhall in honor of his first wife, was designed for him by Werner March, the same architect who would later build the Berlin Olympic Stadium for the 1936 games. Göring moved in during 1934. At that point, it was a modest two-story hunting lodge of roughly 230 square meters. It was surrounded by guardhouses and a fence, and heavily protected by members of the Hermann Göring Regiment.
Crucially, Göring paid nothing toward the lavish construction costs. Hitler approved the funding, on the understanding that Göring would use the place to host state guests and foreign dignitaries at his own expense. Just over an hour and twenty minutes by car from Berlin, it became Göring’s personal playground, with superb hunting and endless room for his ever-growing art collection. In 1936, Carinhall was extended, mostly to accommodate that hoard of treasures.
Göring had cages built for pet lion cubs he borrowed from Berlin Zoo. The place grew a huge library, a grand hunting hall, a massive model railway, and a multitude of other rooms besides. In 1938, following the birth of his only child, his daughter Edda, Göring ordered yet another extension, in effect doubling the size of the estate. The major room built during that phase was a tremendous mess hall of 400 square meters with panoramic views across the lake, along with a swimming pool, a second library, and a ballroom.
Once again, Göring didn’t pay a single pfennig. The state picked up the Carinhall bill. There was even the ultimate doll’s house built off to the side for little Edda to play in, an exact miniature replica of Sanssouci Palace. Carinhall also functioned as the unofficial headquarters of the Luftwaffe.
Göring’s grand plan, in the end, was to convert the entire building into a giant art museum, scheduled to open in 1953 to mark his sixtieth birthday. The war, of course, scuppered all that. As the conflict turned decisively against Germany, Göring had the defenses at Carinhall stiffened considerably. A series of large air raid bunkers were constructed, and the guard detail from the Hermann Göring Division was increased to two hundred men.
Eventually, six flak towers protected the site, and Göring even had a decoy Carinhall built eight kilometers to the north, designed to fool enemy bombers. That decoy was manned around the clock by a detachment of pioneers from the Hermann Göring Division. As it turned out, the Allied air forces never once attacked the real Carinhall. Göring could fly in and out of his estate with ease, using a small landing strip constructed six kilometers to the north at the edge of the Schorfheide forest.
It had a couple of barrack blocks, a radio station, and a special camouflaged, netted area to store his personal Junkers Ju 52 aircraft. That plane was kept ready for instant use at all times, and his personal pilots, Oberst Udet and Oberstleutnant Fechner, were always on standby to fly the Reichsmarschall wherever he needed to go. In 1943, Göring ordered a large part of his art collection shipped south to the Altaussee salt mine in Austria for safekeeping. Then, in January 1945, he moved more of it to Berchtesgaden, down the hill from his second vacation home near Hitler’s own at Obersalzberg.
There, treasures were hidden in a special bunker beneath the Luftwaffe officers’ mess at Schönau am Königssee. The frantic process of saving his art continued right up until the very end of his power. More trains were procured and loaded with every kind of artwork and personal effect, then shipped off to Berchtesgaden. They would be found abandoned at Berchtesgaden station when American forces arrived in early May 1945.
A guard detail remained at the estate after Göring’s final departure. He left specific orders that if the Red Army got too close, they were to demolish the main building. On the 28th of April 1945, that is exactly what the Luftwaffe guards did, reducing the estate to ruins using AZ Luftwaffe aerial bombs that detonated like giant mines. At the end of the war, Göring surrendered himself to the Americans on the 7th of May 1945.
He started rumors that he had secreted art and gold in tunnels beneath Carinhall or had thrown them into the Großdöllnsee. Even today, people dig all over the site searching for that fabled treasure. In the weeks after the war, locals stripped the remains of Carinhall professionally and thoroughly. Huge amounts of valuable furniture, light fixtures, marble, doors, and other materials ended up in local homes, and much of it remains there to this day.
In the post-war period, the East German authorities leveled what was left of Carinhall. If you visit the site today, it is absolutely littered with parts of the houses, from tiny fragments to enormous multi-ton slabs, now largely covered by forest and home only to snakes and bats. A number of underground rooms and bunkers still survive at Carinhall and are regularly picked over by treasure hunters. I managed to squeeze my way inside a few of them.
So back to my claim that I stayed at Carinhall. It’s not nonsense at all. As I mentioned, one part of Göring’s estate remains completely intact today and is actually operating as a hotel. That building was the Carinhall guesthouse.
Built in 1934, its purpose was to provide secure and comfortable accommodation for important dignitaries visiting Göring at his estate. It sits in a scenic spot just across the lake from Carinhall proper, and it shares many features with the great house. There’s a bronze ram at the entrance, for example, and similar fixtures and fittings inside, all on a somewhat more functional scale than Göring’s main residence. During the Nazi era, the building was called the Schorfhaus, named after Göring’s chief forester at Carinhall.
It was overlooked in the destruction of the main house, and after the war it found itself inside East Germany. The East German leadership also enjoyed hunting, and in the 1960s, the Schorfhaus was requisitioned for use by the highest party leaders of East Germany. The entire site, including the ruins of Carinhall, was sealed off from the public and carefully guarded by the East German Army. In the 1970s, the guesthouse was trebled in size with the addition of two large wings and associated buildings, such as a swimming pool, a sauna house, and so on.
There was also a special lecture-style theater built for political meetings. When East Germany ceased to exist with German reunification in 1990, the Schorfhaus was sold and converted into a hotel called the Hotel Döllnsee Schorfheide. That’s where I stayed for one night a few days ago, taking a room in the East German extension. A word of caution for any non-Germans interested in staying there.
It is deep within the old East Germany, where attitudes toward foreigners remain somewhat backward compared with Western Germany. The kindest thing I can say is that it’s a hotel that caters to Germans. That said, the views are very nice, and the ruins of Carinhall are easily accessible on the other side of the lake. Speaking of ruins, there are at least four other intact structures from Göring’s Carinhall that can be seen besides the old guesthouse.
The twin gatehouses at the entrance to the Carinhall main drive are completely intact, if a little battered. To the rear of them, you can see how the original brick walls were faced with high-quality granite in the past to give an expensive look, and after nine decades, that facing is now falling away. A distinctive feature of both gatehouses is the carved representation of Göring’s rank, crossed Reichsmarschall’s batons taken from his official standard. Immediately in front of each gatehouse is an identical cottage.
Those were actually barracks for part of the guard detail drawn from a special unit of Göring’s household troops, the Hermann Göring Panzer Division. So there you have it. You can still stay at Carinhall if you like, a fact that is little known more widely, and you don’t have to rough it under canvas either. Interestingly, there is another relic of Göring on public display only seventy kilometers south of Carinhall, at the German Military History Museum at the former RAF Gatow in West Berlin.
This powder-blue Reichsmarschall’s tunic and trousers is one of only a few surviving Göring uniforms that is indisputably authentic. It was acquired from none other than Göring’s widow, Emmy, by the museum in the early 1970s, initially on loan. In 2013, the museum was able to purchase the uniform outright from Göring’s daughter, Edda. This very uniform was undoubtedly worn at Carinhall, for Göring had several in this color and style.
This particular example is unusual. Instead of having normal three-dimensional metal shoulder boards, like those seen on a summer uniform of Göring’s that I examined at the Imperial War Museum in London, it carries a rare embroidered design. Still, as I said, this uniform is completely authentic. The whole thing is a strange, layered remnant of history.
You can stand on the forest floor amid the shattered slabs of what was once the most lavish private residence in the Third Reich, and then walk back across the water to sleep in a warm bed inside the very guesthouse where Göring’s dignitaries once stayed, now serving schnitzel and coffee to modern travelers. The forest has swallowed most of the grandeur, and the snakes and bats have taken over the bunkers below, but the story still lingers there, in the battered gatehouses, the echoes of the lake, and the old East German extension that now houses paying guests. The treasure hunters still come, with their metal detectors and their maps drawn from half-remembered rumors, convinced that something of Göring’s great hoard lies buried beneath the leaf mold. They dig in the ruins, poke into the collapsing underground chambers, and leave empty-handed more often than not.
The gold, if any ever existed in that lost tunnel, has never been found, and probably never will be. What remains is something more accessible, a hotel room overlooking the same water Göring once looked out on, and a handful of stone structures that somehow slipped through the chaos of 1945 and the decades of neglect that followed. For an evening, I sat by the window and watched the light fade across the lake, thinking about the monstrous figure who once ruled all of this, and the strange fate that left his guesthouse standing while his grand hall was blasted to rubble. The next morning, I crossed the water to walk among the ruins and climb into a few of the surviving bunkers.
In the stillness of the forest, with the birds calling and the leaves shifting underfoot, it was hard to imagine the noise and fury that must have accompanied the final destruction. But the evidence was all around me, in the cracked concrete, the twisted metal, and the great slabs of masonry half-buried in the undergrowth. I came away with a strange respect for the sheer scale of what Göring built and what was lost. It is not every day you check into a hotel that once housed state visitors to the Reichsmarschall, then step out the door and walk through the wreckage of his empire.
Yet that is exactly what Carinhall offers today, an odd, unadvertised blend of comfort and ruin, of grandeur and decay, sitting quietly in the middle of the Schorfheide. The hotel itself is unremarkable, the service brusque and the food plain, but the setting more than compensates. If you know where to look, you can find more of Göring’s world than the history books let on, and you can do it without pitching a tent.