Lufthansa Seeheim: a fascinating history

In 1973, the German airline moved the training center for its employees from Hamburg to the Bergstraße. From the very beginning, other companies and institutions have also taken advantage of the good infrastructure of Lufthansa’s training center in order to hold conferences and meetings of their own. The most famous example is the so-called “Seeheimer Kreis” – an association of SPD members of the German Federal Parliament – that was founded there in 1978 and used the conference hotel until 1984.

Dr. Klaus Bonhoeffer – the building’s namesake

At the beginning of the 1990s, the building was expanded and renamed the “Klaus-Bonhoeffer-Haus”.

Bonhoeffer was the syndic and manager of Lufthansa´s legal department from 1935 to 1945. Social issues interested him from an early point in his career. He was influenced by the thoughts of Max Weber and had close ties to his brother Dietrich who played a central part in the church resistance to the Third Reich.

In a period in which technological development achieved enormous progress, justice and the rule of law in Germany experienced a downturn of a magnitude previously unknown. Deep outrage about this state of affairs drove Klaus Bonhoeffer into the resistance against the national-socialist regime. He was arrested during the Nazi purges after the failed assassination attempt on Hitler and executed on April 23, 1945.

Lufthansa invests 100 million euros in Seeheim

In times of growing competition, Lufthansa once again declared professional development to be a strategic factor. The “Lufthansa School of Business”, Germany’s first “Corporate University”, trained both young professionals and management personnel.

But in the new millennium, the demands on learning increased rapidly. In 2006, rather than embark on a costly renovation of the more than 30 year-old building, Lufthansa decided in favour of a more economical new building at the same location – and invested around 100 million euros.

After two years of construction, the Lufthansa Training & Conference Center Seeheim opened its doors in early 2009. It is one of the biggest and most modern conference hotels in Europe.