‘The hills are alive,’ warbled Julie Andrews as she strode through a verdant Alpine mountain meadow, ‘with the sound of music. With songs they have sung, for a thousand years.’ But there was always a dark side to the peaks she sang about in The Sound of Music, and they have just claimed another victim.
The Untersberg, according to legend, is where emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the ruler of the First Reich, sleeps in a hidden grotto
This week Andreas Münzhuber, reportedly a leading German neo-Nazi, tripped on a root and plunged 200 feet to his death climbing on the Untersberg, a mountain massif straddling the German-Austrian border near the town of Berchtesgaden. The Untersberg is the actual mountain that Andrews was filmed singing on in the opening of The Sound of Music, and where the von Trapp family can be seen fleeing from Nazi Austria at the end of the film.
It seems unlikely that Münzhuber was in the region because of his love of musicals.
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