Colossus of Prora, the longest building in the world, Bad Prora, Binz, Rügen Island, Baltic coast
Planned for 20,000 guests, Hitler's monumental holiday camp complex on Rügen is a bizarre remnant.
It was built on the orders of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, according to the designs of a Nazi architect, Clemens Klotz. The manic aim: 20,000 people at a time were to vacation in the nearly five kilometer-long (3.1 mi) holiday camp, arranged by the Nazi "Kraft durch Freude" (Strength through Joy) organization. Its mission was to control and bring into line the German population's leisure time. All 10,000 rooms were to have a sea view, which explains the gigantic length of the structure
When the regime instigated the Second World War in 1939, construction was discontinued. The complex was never completed. No KdF tourist ever vacationed in the "seaside resort for twenty thousand". Instead, the housing blocks, which were shells, were used militarily — as barracks, for instance, first under the Nazi regime, and then in communist East Germany, the GDR. After the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was reunited, the complex was officially historically listed. Museums and artists' studios moved in, but large sections of the monstrous structure, considered the longest of its kind in the world, decayed.