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Bedding down where Napoleon, Hitler and Diana did
It was a Saturday evening like any other. And as the crepuscular light fell on Paris, a pair of lovebirds dined on what would soon be their last meal at the legendary Ritz Hotel. The evening was, of course, August 30, 1997 and just after midnight the couple—Dodi Al Fayed and Diana, Princess of Wales—would perish in a car crash in a tunnel along the Seine.
The Ritz, which for more than a century had cultivated a devoted following among the world’s elite and well-known including the likes of Marcel Proust, the Shah of Iran and Coco Chanel, was suddenly thrust into the public consciousness and became synonymous with the death of a larger-than-life royal: Diana Spencer.
It wasn’t images of lavishly decorated interiors that the world would get to know the Ritz by, but those few seconds of closed circuit TV frames showing her sidling through the revolving doors. Even today, the hotel is weary of the event; when asked how they dealt with it on a PR level at the time a spokeswoman tersely responded, “I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to make any comment about Diana; none whatsoever, that’s our policy, so no comment.”
See our slideshow of Hotels with History.
The Ritz is just one of a number of hotels whose pasts are linked with well-chronicled historical events. Many of these hotels are still in operation, like another Paris’s stalwart, the Hôtel de Crillon, which like a few other posh Paris hostelries was taken over by the Nazis during their occupation of France. Others, like the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, have been turned into museums. And some, like the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, have been razed altogether.
Most properties with checkered pasts are, understandably, reluctant to talk about them. After all, if you were the Inter-Continental group, would you want to shout from the rooftops that your recently-opened Bavarian resort at Berchtesgaden is actually located on the hilltop site of the Eagle's Nest, the former retreat of Adolf Hitler? Probably not. Although, if you’re bedding down at the Europa Hotel in Belfast, chances are you already know it was the most bombed hotel in the world (28 times), or that there was an Irgun attack on British troops at Jerusalem’s famed King David Hotel.
Not all hotels, though, boast unpleasant accounts; to the contrary, some have aided in changing the course of history. The Fairmont Hamilton Princess on Bermuda became a crucial Allied intelligence hub where all mail, radio and telegraphic traffic bound for Europe, the U.S. and the Far East was intercepted and then analyzed by 1,200 British experts, scientists and linguists, before being routed to their final destination.
Indeed, World War II had an impact on a number of hotels in all sorts of ways. Walking through the whitewashed colonial-style lobby of Singapore’s luxe Raffles Hotel it’s hard to imagine throngs of Japanese soldiers, who had invaded the tiny island by way of the Malay Peninsula on bicycles, milling about. Or that Helsinki’s Hotel Kämp would house the Finnish foreign ministry's press services during the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939.
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