The Braies Lake & its history

Helpful facts

This unique mountain lake in the Dolomites also plays a role in South Tyrolean legends. Because from here, the subterranean parts of the Fanes kingdom could be reached by boat. The now buried gate to the underworld is said to have been located at the southern end of the lake in the direction of the Seekofel, which is why it is called Sass dla Porta (Gate Mountain) in Ladin. The tourist development of the lake only took off in 1899. In this year the opening of the Grandhotel Pragser Wildsee, which was built for the Hellenstainer family from Niederdorf, was celebrated. Around the hotel an important event of the Second World War took place at the end of April, beginning of May 1945. Since the end of 1944, the "Reichsführer SS" Heinrich Himmler, in coordination with the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), Ernst Kaltenbrunner, had the most prominent political prisoners of the Nazi state brought from the German concentration camps first to the Dachau concentration camp and finally, in April 1945, to Villabassa in the South Tyrolean Puster Valley. The SS guards had orders not to let the prisoners fall into enemy hands alive. Thanks to the courageous actions of Wichard von Alvensleben, an officer in the Wehrmacht, the prisoners, who were finally housed in the Pragser Wildsee Hotel, were liberated there by the US Army on 4 May 1945. The background: After the armistice of September 8, 1943 between the Western Allies and Italy, the German Reich had de facto annexed South Tyrol and parts of Northern Italy as well as of today's Slovenia (i.e. the former Austro-Hungarian dominion) as "operation zones" in order to propagandistically elevate the Alps to the so-called "Alpine Fortress" and to be able to defend them from Bavaria to Trentino against the advancing Allies. In the last weeks and months of the Nazi regime, Himmler and Kaltenbrunner tried to create a favorable negotiating position with the Allies through blackmail. The 139 so-called special prisoners from seventeen European nations imprisoned in Niederndorf, as well as a group of clan prisoners, were to be used as hostages for this purpose. Among the prominent prisoners were the former Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg with his wife and daughter, the former French Prime Minister Léon Blum and his wife, the Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller, as well as family members of the Hitler assassin Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. The hostage plans failed. The German Captain Wichard von Alvensleben, had learned of the prisoner transport and on April 30, 1945, had the prisoners in Villabassa in the Puster Valley freed from SS control by a Wehrmacht shock troop. On the same day the prisoners were taken to the nearby Hotel Pragser Wildsee, where they were cared for by the hotel owner Emma Heiss-Hellenstainer. On 4 May 1945, the US Army arrived at the hotel and brought the liberated prisoners to safety in two convoys on 8 and 10 May. Relatives of Stauffenberg and other resistance fighters meet at the hotel every year around July 20. The Pragser Wildsee contemporary history archive is located there, and is the only one devoted entirely to the 1945 hostage crisis. In order to preserve the historically valuable archive material for posterity, it was gathered from all over the world and is now housed in the Hotel Braies Lake.