Cashing in on the Nazi leader’s brand name, authorities in Ukraine have decided to open up one of Hitler’s Eastern Front military headquarters and run it as a tourist attraction. Situated in a pine forest just north of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine, Führerhauptquartier Wehrwolf – and no, that’s not a spelling mistake but a portmanteau of werewolf and wehr, the German word for defence – was, in its heyday, a self-sufficient secret installation, replete with all of the modern amenities of the era. Of the 11,000 or so prisoners of war and local civilians who constructed the facilitates, over half died – either during the works or immediately after completion at the hands of firing squads.
Today, a nearby memorial pays homage to those labourers, but little, other than lumps of concrete and a swimming pool, which there’s no record of Hitler ever having used, remains of the Führerhauptquartier itself, the Nazis having destroyed what they could when they abandoned it, and the Soviets having completed the task by sealing off the underground bunker later. Mykola Djiga, who heads the provincial administration, has said that “it is time to make the Wehrwolf headquarters a tourist destination, a memorial to the victims of fascism”. Sounds good, but as a memorial already exists, is a museum – even one that’s to symbolically open on the anniversary of the Victory Day over Fascism (May the 9th) – also needed?
Alas, as anyone who’s done the rounds of former war sites and concentration camps knows, Nazis and the Holocaust sell – as the coach loads of frightful, generally ignorant and schadenfreude-enriched package tourists who visit such locations on sightseeing daytrips pay testament to. One can’t blame the Ukrainian authorities though, I suppose, as they have to top up their depleted coffers somehow. At least it’s not Chernobyl they’re planning to turn into a tourist attraction. Oh, hang on . . . .
Street sweeper Aleksandr Kalistratov, who says the allegations against him are “absurd” [which they are], could, if found guilty, be jailed for up to two years. After his house was raided by armed security officers, who confiscated his books, prosecutors charged him under Article 282(1) of the Russian Federation Criminal Code for inciting religious enmity and distributing literature covered by the rapidly growing Federal List of Extremist Materials, which currently runs to over 50 pages. As Geraldine Fagan, a Moscow based religious affairs analyst, put it:
And if loo patriots in other countries are feeling a little bit left out they’ll be pleased to hear that tomorrow, November the 19th, is the official 
