A major fire broke out at the Kehlsteinhaus, widely known as the Eagle’s Nest — Adolf Hitler’s former Alpine mountain retreat in southern Germany’s Bavaria state — late Friday evening, prompting a large-scale emergency response that remains active into early Saturday, local law enforcement confirmed. Emergency dispatchers based in Traunstein received an automatic fire alert from the iconic mountaintop structure at 21:15 local time (19:15 GMT) on Friday, with arriving fire crews finding the building fully engulfed in spreading flames. Rough, steep alpine terrain surrounding the site has significantly complicated firefighting operations, even as roughly 200 emergency personnel have been deployed to contain the blaze, which was still actively burning as of early Saturday. No casualty reports have been registered to date, Bavarian police stated. Authorities have taken an unidentified suspect into custody in connection with the incident, launching a full criminal probe to verify the individual’s potential links to the fire. Completed by the Nazi regime in 1938, the Eagle’s Nest sits perched high above the town of Berchtesgaden. It served as a part-time operational seat of government for Hitler, where top Nazi military commanders gathered in 1941 to strategize the launch of the invasion of the Soviet Union. The site was also used as a filming location for Nazi propaganda productions crafted to frame Hitler as a gentle figure devoted to nature and wildlife, a deliberate public relations facade that concealed the regime’s genocidal agenda. Unlike many prominent Nazi-era structures, the Eagle’s Nest avoided intentional demolition following Germany’s 1945 defeat in World War II. It has since been transformed into a high-traffic tourist attraction that hosts a popular mountain inn, with its official website framing the site as a deliberate, cautionary reminder of the unfathomable atrocities and moral abysses of the inhumane Nazi dictatorship. The Nazi regime led by Hitler orchestrated the deaths of tens of millions of people across Europe, including the systematic industrialized genocide of Jewish communities across the continent.