World leaders meet in castle that once “served as a Nazi military vacation camp.”
QUICK FACTS:
- World leaders have been meeting since Sunday for the annual “Group of Seven” (G-7) summit in Schloss Elmau castle in Germany’s Bavarian Alps.
- The castle is located in Krun, Germany, where Joe Biden during the meeting pledged 200 billion U.S. tax-payer dollars to fund projects in developing countries.
- “Today, we officially launch the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. We collectively have dozens of projects already underway around the globe,” Biden declared. “And I’m proud to announce the United States will mobilize $200 billion in public and private capital over the next five years for that Partnership.”
- Schloss Elmau castle was built “at the onset of World War I by philosopher and theologian Johannes Müller as a communal retreat for his followers,” The Washington Post (WaPo) reported, and “has served as a Nazi military vacation camp, a field hospital, a sanctuary for Holocaust survivors and the site of Germany’s last G-7 meeting.”
WaPo DETAILS THE CASTLE’S NAZI HISTORY:
- “The castle’s backstory tracks closely with Germany’s tumultuous 20th-century history,” WaPo explains.
- The property is now a “luxury hotel” owned by Müller family, who lost ownership of the castle “temporarily during the denazification process following World War II” because of the family’s “adulation of Adolf Hitler” and “ambivalent attitude to the Nazi regime.”
- At the time, members of the Müller family had “lauded Hitler as ‘the receiving organ for God’s government’ and a ‘leader of a national revolution of the common good over self-interest.'”
BACKGROUND:
- The G-7 was created in 1975 as a forum for gathering the leaders of the world’s leading industrial nations.
- “The annual G7 summits have over the years developed into a platform for determining the course of multilateral discourse and shaping political responses to global challenges. It complements the role of the G20, which is widely regarded as the framework for ongoing global economic coordination,” according to the European Union.
