Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Mount Hitler on Google Maps

German Spiegel writes (my translation):

If you use the internet mapping program Google Earth to take a virtual fly-over at the foothills of the Alps region, you’ll hit on a strange name south of Bad Tölz. “Mount Hitler” is the geographic label assigned to the 1,205 meters elevation that goes by the name of “Hegelkopf.” Georg Kellner, mayor of the local community Wackersberg, is outraged: “I’m 64 years old now but I haven’t heard the name ’Mount Hitler’ in all my life. What’s with this stupidity?”



Google Germany spokesperson Stefan Keuchel has a straightforward answer to this question: “In the past, that’s what the mountain was called, plain and simple.”

It turns out the structure was renamed “Mount Hitler” (Hitler-Berg) by Nazi-followers for the period of 1933-1945, and that the old data keeps popping up in various data sources used for Google Earth. Stefan promised to get rid of Mount Hitler “once and for all” during the next update.

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