Did Adolf Hitler want to live in a hotel in Manchester after World War II?
In addition to being known from Manchester to Manhattan as one of the most evil men in history, Adolf Hitler was also an emotionally and psychologically stunted man-child who wanted to possess things that meant something to others, simply for the joy of having them.
Hitler famously danced a victory jig upon the surrender of France in 1940, while planning on building a bigger version of the Arc de Triomphe if they won World War II. He was also dead set on bringing Nelson’s Column from Trafalgar Square to Berlin in the event of a successful invasion of the United Kingdom, otherwise known as Operation Sealion… It’s why a story as patently absurd as this feels like it has a ring of truth to it.
The story goes that had the Nazis successfully invaded the United Kingdom, Hitler had his eyes set on one place above all others that he was going to rule from. This does check out, knowing the man in question, but it wasn’t some perversion of an icon of English culture as you might think… It wasn’t 10 Downing Street, or Buckingham Palace, or Windsor Castle, but instead, it was a hotel in Manchester, namely the Midland Hotel.
Now, to look at the hotel, you can kind of get it. It’s an awe-inspiring piece of Edwardian architecture, situated where Peter Street becomes Oxford Street, that really does look more like a palace or an opera house than a hotel.
It also survived The Blitz, the German bombing campaign on England in World War II that decimated nearby parts of Manchester – so the saying goes, this was because Hitler wanted it for himself and ordered the Luftwaffe to spare it.
This is, like pretty much all the urban legends linking Hitler to the North of England, nothing more than an urban legend, and we can see this by looking at the declassified documents of Operation Sealion. The plans were to divide the United Kingdom into six military-economic commands in London, Birmingham, Newcastle, Liverpool, Glasgow and Dublin. You see a city missing from that? Yeah, Manchester quite simply did not fit into the Reich’s plans at any level.
We even know where Hitler wanted the central command to be in the event of a successful invasion. He wanted the centre of all power in his United Kingdom to be Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of Sir Winston Churchill. Again, Hitler only really wanted to take things people were invested in and make them his. No, the Midland Hotel survived The Blitz in much the same way that St Paul’s Cathedral did. Sheer luck.
It’s not a comfortable thought because we always like to believe that things happen for a reason, but most things don’t. Especially not during The Blitz, when bombing raids having any kind of accuracy was a truly laughable thought. The only way any plane was dropping a bomb on anything was by blind chance alone.
While that made the experience truly terrifying for the country, it also meant that the Luftwaffe could not specifically target the manufacturing plants and military bases that, if destroyed, would have crippled the Allied defence against the Reich.