With amazement I read Neil Fisher’s article in The Times travel section last Saturday about a weekend in the Austrian city of Linz.

It began with three fat paragraphs about what he called the Great Austrian Bake Off – the writer’s efforts to create a 17th-century cake, the Linzer Torte.

Then it was on to the “tricky competition” the city faced in the tourism stakes from its neighbours Salzburg and Vienna.

“Its steelworks, first built up in the 1930,” Fisher wrote, “drove Austria’s economic recovery after the war but gave the city an insalubrious reputation.”

What gave Linz its insalubrious reputation was its status as the childhood home city of the maniac who started that war, Adolf Hitler.

Yet nowhere in the course of Fisher’s long article was this salient fact mentioned. Indeed, the Führer was not name-checked at all.

One supposes that Fisher, an opera critic, must be aware of Linz’s claim to fame. So why his silence?

Perhaps a cussed reluctance to state the obvious, rather as I, writing about New Orleans, declined to mention the ‘j’ word.

Possible an in-joke with colleagues. Dare he write 1,000 words on Linz without alluding to the elephant in the room?

Or did he fear offending his hosts? “Neil Fisher was a guest of the Austrian tourist office,” it was stated beside the article.

Or did he consider Hitler incidental to the Linz story?

Hitler didn’t consider Linz tangential to his.

Here is his biographer, Ian Kershaw, on the subject: “In the 1940s, he would speak repeatedly of making Linz the cultural counterweight to Vienna and the most beautiful city on the Danube.

“He would pour vast sums into the town’s reconstruction. With the Red Army at his portals he was still poring over the model... of the city of his youth where he intended to spend his last days and be buried.”