Hitler is top of the bill in 2009

Linz, Austria: Adolf Hitler is one of the last names you would expect to be used in a tourism marketing campaign.

But the Nazi leader has been given centre stage by the next European City of Culture.

Liverpool highlighted its connections to the Beatles, its most famous sons, when it became City of Culture in 2008. But the Austrian city of Linz, has decided to showcase the works of the architect of the Third Reich.

Hitler spent nine years of his childhood in the city, which he loved so much he intended to make it the location for a magnificent five-star Adolf Hitler Hotel. He had also proposed building a 162 metre bell tower in Linz to house the remains of his parents.

He planned to make Linz one of the five model "Fuhrer Cities" of the Third Reich: a "Fuhrer Museum" would have been 1,100 metres long and housed 16 million works of art, the vast majority of which were taken from private collections.

The municipal leaders of Linz, buoyed by securing the city of culture accolade, which can generate millions of pounds in tourism revenue, have decided to exploit, rather than ignore, the Hitler connection.

Artistic centre

Locals and tourists are now invited to explore Nazi remnants throughout town. Equipped with an audio guide, they can listen to footage of survivors from the Mauthausen/Gusen concentration camp.

One exhibition is entitled "The cultural capital of the Fuhrer", and documents his plans to turn Linz into an artistic centre to rival Paris, Vienna and Berlin.

There will also be trips to a factory that was moved from occupied Czechoslovakia and named the Hermann-Goring-Werke after the Luftwaffe chief. Visitors will also be shown the Hauptplatz, or Main Square: once known as Adolf-Hitler-Platz.

Ulrich Fuchs, the deputy manager of events for 2009, said: "Whenever you come to Linz, you will find something related to this topic. We are not sweeping Hitler under the carpet."

Martin Heller, the artistic director of Linz 2009, said there was an "obligation" to tackle the city's Nazi history. He said: "We want to reflect back and show how cultural and political ambitions went together in the Nazi time."

Peter Assmann, the director of the Upper Austrian State Museums, rejected charges of glorifying Hitler's memory. He said: "Hitler is fact, so we just face this fact and we face it with many arguments, with a lot of information about that time. People see the exhibition and they get impulses for discussion."

War crimes: Cchasing suspects

Prosecutors have assembled a case against a retired autoworker living in Ohio that could lead to Germany's last major Nazi war crimes trial.

The Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, based for the past half-century in the southwestern German town of Kludwigsburg, recently recommended the filing of murder charges against John Demjanjuk, 88, a Ukrainian by birth who immigrated to the United States in 1952. Demjanjuk has long been accused of working for the Nazis as a death camp guard, but his conviction on similar charges in Israel was overturned in 1993 by that country's Supreme Court.

It has been seven years since Germany last convicted a former Nazi of committing atrocities under Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Although prosecutors say they are pursuing other targets, the Demjanjuk case could be Germany's final opportunity to bring a major Nazi figure to justice.

The few former Nazis still alive are in their late 80s or 90s, raising doubts about their ability to stand trial.

- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service