‘Andor’ Season 2 Premiere Scene Has a Real-Life Nazi Inspiration

This story discusses a meeting scene from the first episode of Andor season two.

A key scene in the Andor season two premiere takes some real-life inspiration from World War II history.

About 20 minutes into the first episode, there’s a secret Imperial meeting led by Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelson) on a snowy mountain compound. There he plots the takeover and potential destruction of the peaceful textile-producing planet of planet Ghorman with a select group of high command officers. It’s a scene that has major importance for the final scene of the Disney+ show, which leads up to the creation of the Death Star.

“No notes, no records, none of you were here, nobody puts this in their calendar,” Krennic warns the group. “You’re colleagues, superiors, if they’re not in this room, they’re not cleared for the project. The group in this room is the tightest of closed circles.”

Andor creator Tony Gilroy tells The Hollywood Reporter that the scene is like when the Third Reich plotted its Final Solution at the Wannsee conference in 1942, where 15 members of the German high command secretly plotted the extermination of millions of Jews. “The very first scene that Krennic has where he talks about Ghorman, that’s based on the Wannsee convention — the Nazi convention where the Nazis got together and planned the final solution over a business lunch.”

Visually, the meeting location doesn’t look anything like the Berlin suburb palace where the Wannsee conference took place. Yet the snowy mountaintop location does look strikingly like the combination of two famous Third Reich landmarks: The Eagle’s Nest, Hilter’s famous hilltop retreat in the Bavarian Alps, where the high command made many key decisions (and was memorably depicted in HBO’s Band of Brothers). The location also resembles Austria’s Hohenwerfen Castle, which was another Nazi-run snowy hilltop outpost during the war.

Here’s the Imperial outpost at The Maltheen Divide in the Andor premiere:

Andor trailer

Here’s the Eagle’s Nest:

The Tea House (Teehaus) at Kehlstein Mountain in the Bavarian Alps, formerly Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat.

Three Lions/Getty Images

And here’s Hohenwerfen Castle:

Hohenwerfen Castle

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The Galactic Empire in Star Wars was (rather not so subtly) heavily inspired by Nazi Germany and other fascist dictatorships. The Nazis also had “stormtroopers” (Sturmabteilung), Darth Vader’s helmet has echos of helmets worn by Wehrmacht officers, Hitler went from Germany’s chancellor to dictator (not unlike Palpatine going from chancellor to Emperor), and George Lucas originally used World War II dogfight footage for the basis of A New Hope‘s space fight scenes.

Andor is Disney+’s acclaimed Star Wars drama series, which follows the adventures of Rebel Alliance leader Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and leads up to the events in the film Rogue One. The 12-episode second season will be released in three episode blocks over the next four weeks.