New Zealand ski field Mt Hutt has reportedly removed references to a former Nazi military officer from its attractions.
Management at the Canterbury ski field Mt Hutt have removed the name of Willi Huber from a ski run and restaurant following an online protest and complaints from the New Zealand Jewish Council and the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand.
Huber, lauded as the ‘father of the mountain’ in a 2017 TVNZ Sunday programme, died in August last year, aged 98.
A member of Hitler’s Waffen-SS, Huber rose to the rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer (equivalent of a captain) during the Second World War before becoming a prisoner-of-war.
Arriving in New Zealand in 1953, in the early 1970s he spent a winter on Mt Hutt monitoring weather and plotting ski trails.
When the ski field opened in 1973, he was its first manager.
Following Huber’s death last year and news reports on his life and legacy, Rob Berg, President of the Zionist Federation of New Zealand, started an online petition to erase Huber’s name from Mt Hutt.
Subsequently, members of the New Zealand Jewish Council and the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand discussed the issue with Paul Anderson, Chief Executive of NZSki, the company that operates Mt Hutt, and Queenstown fields The Remarkables and Coronet Peak.
Read the article in Australasian Leisure Management.