Just finished my second read. What do you say? I didn't notice any change in the quality of the cover, to be honest. and I was stuck for finding the "Hitler's Hellmouth" piece and wondered if there'd been an editorial slip, then realised it was the "Fortean Traveller" bit at the back - realised with a horrible guilty start how often I tend to skip over this bit to get to the letters, personal accounts, and Hunt Emerson.Iit was actually quite interesting as a mystery. And so much in Eastern Europe has been "clouded" by the undeniable fact so much of the ground war in WW2 passed over the region - so much has been lost, destroyed, disrupted, et c, what with total war going on, and all the population transfers and rebuilding that went on after 1945. Not to mention the paranoid secrecy of the Warsaw Pact, Stalinism, cold war, et c. (And what came this way in 1968?) The idea the current Czech administration has got secrets it doesn't want out in the open is plausible. And you also have the mixing of populations that occured prior to 1945 and the forcible expulsion of the Czech Germans. several scenarios: no European country, and this includes Britain, wants to admit to the full degree of colloboration that went on with Germany during the war years. We were never occupied. Czechoslovakia was one of Hitler's first scalps. Evidence of collaboration is embarrassing. Was Hrad Houska some sort of centre for Czech colloborationists who even today don't want their involvement with the occupiers to come out in the open? It was later used as a "convalescent centre" - shades of the Russian use of "mental hospitals" as informal prisons for people hostile or critical of the regime? Reason for highly placed Czech people to be nervous and hide the relevant files and documents that could be used against them? Also, the location appears to place it in what was then the Sudetenland - the then dominantly German part of the country. Could be worth digging a bit deeper here - for instance, out of the many "foreign legion" battalions of the Waffen-SS was there a specifically Czech one? Was the German destruction of all records at HH motivated by a sort of kindness, or fellow-soldier loyalty, to ethnic Czechs who volunteered for the SS - to leave no records that could be used to incriminate Czech SS men after the war? We know they did this for SS men of other nationalities, after all, when they realised the war was over. This is beginning to interest me...