After months of pressure, a ski run and restaurant at Canterbury’s Mt Hutt are being renamed… David Williams reports for Newsroom.

A ski field has quietly wiped a Nazi officer’s name from its slopes – but not from the entire mountain.

Willi Huber, a pioneer of Canterbury ski field Mt Hutt, lauded as the ‘father of the mountain’ in a 2017 TVNZ Sunday programme, died in August last year, aged 97.

However, the ski field’s promise to continue to honour him with the name of its restaurant and a ski run hit a swastika-shaped snag. The Austrian volunteered for the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the notorious SS, and became a decorated officer.

(SS is an abbreviation for Schutzstaffel, meaning “protective echelon”. It was founded by Adolf Hitler in 1925 as his personal bodyguards but grew with the rise of the Nazi movement, to 38 combat divisions comprising 950,000 men. Heinrich Himmler headed the SS from 1929.)

News of Huber being memorialised at Mt Hutt sparked a wave of outrage, especially in light of his comments to Sunday – the link to which was deleted last night – that Hitler was “clever”.

Read the full story here on Newsroom.