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Three years before Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Adolf Hitler ordered the construction of the world's largest tourist resort, located on a beachfront property on the island of Rügen.
The Nazis called it Prora.
Capable of holding more than 20,000 residents at a single time, Prora was meant to comfort the weary German worker who toiled away in a factory without respite.
According to historian and tour guide Roger Moorhouse, it was also meant to serve as the carrot to the stick of the Gestapo — a pacifying gesture to get the German people on Hitler's side.
But then World War II began, and Prora's construction stalled — until now.
In 1936, Germany was still enmeshed in the concept of "people's community," or volksgemeinschaft, from World War I. It was a sense that Germans stood united, no matter what.
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While the Nazi police state was in development, the overarching German vision was a hopeful one, Moorhouse tells Business Insider. "And this is where something like Prora comes in."
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Over the next three years, more than 9,000 workers erected a 2.7-mile-long building out of brick and concrete. Its practicality was dwarfed by its grandness. Moorhouse calls it "megalomania in stone."
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