Bidspirit auction | German Real-Photo Postcard ”Der Berghof”

German Real-Photo Postcard ”Der Berghof” - Obersalzberg - A period real-photo postcard captioned ”Der Berghof”, showing the mountainside residence at Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden set against a wooded slope and rocky peak. The card carries a printed credit for Photo-Hoffmann, Muenchen, Theresienstr. 74, and bears a purple oval cachet reading ”Obersalzberg 1000 Meter bei Berchtesgaden”. It is franked with a 6-pfennig Deutsches Reich definitive stamp cancelled with a Koenigssee postmark dated 7.5, and addressed in ink to a family at Loipersdorf, with a handwritten message in German script. The Berghof was Adolf Hitler's mountain residence above Berchtesgaden in the Obersalzberg, expanded from a smaller chalet he had purchased in the late 1920s into an extensively enlarged compound during the 1930s that served as a retreat, propaganda backdrop, and informal seat of government where he received foreign dignitaries. The Obersalzberg area was progressively cleared of other residents and turned into a restricted NSDAP zone housing Hitler and senior figures such as Martin Bormann and Hermann Goering. Photographs of the Berghof, many produced by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's official photographer, were widely reproduced on postcards as part of the regime's cultivation of his public image, and such cards circulated commercially through the 1930s and into the war years.