LOCATION Beneath Berlin, Germany
NEAREST POPULATION HUB Berlin
SECRECY OVERVIEW Location uncertain: Hitler’s underground hideaway in the last days of the Second World War.
Adolf Hitler spent his final days and hours in an underground bunker beneath the very buildings he had hoped would serve as the command center for his Thousand Year Reich. Instead, the Führerbunker witnessed some of the most tawdry scenes in the story of history’s most tawdry regime. After the war, the remains of the bunker festered beneath Berlin, sealed from the public and left to fade in the memory.
The Führerbunker was situated beneath the formidable Old Chancellery buildings (located at 77 Wilhelmstraße, close to the New Reich Chancellery that he had his favorite architect, Albert Speer, build for him on one of Wilhelmstraße’s offshoots, Voßstraße). An entrance to the bunker led from the Chancellery gardens. The subterranean complex was built in two distinct phases, the first beginning in 1936 and the second in 1943. It was originally intended as a fairly standard air raid shelter, but as the tide of the war turned, Hitler envisaged it as an alternative command center.
In terms of architecture, the complex was built on a split-level connected by a staircase. Each section had a steel door and a bulkhead so that they could be closed off from each other if necessary. Hitler’s quarters were on the lower level, at a depth of about 15 meters (50 ft).
The bunker lay beneath a curtain of reinforced concrete, and was divided into around 18 rooms along a central corridor. Hitler and his lover (and, ultimately, wife), Eva Braun, shared a suite of six rooms decorated with furniture brought from the Chancellery. There was also a map room, a communications room and several guardrooms, as well as space for Martin Bormann (Hitler’s private secretary), the family of Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and assorted other cohorts, all of whom lived out the last days of the war there.
BUNKER PLANS An overhead view of the Führerbunker as it would have looked in operation. The oldest part was the upper section (Vorbunker), completed in 1936 beneath a reception hall at the Reich Chancellery. The complex was extended by the HOCHTIEF construction company as the Second World War approached its final stages.
Key: 1. Kitchen area, 2. Dining area, 3. Goebbels’ family apartments, 4. Hitler’s private rooms, 5. Map room, 6. Conference room.
The Battle for Berlin began in mid-April 1945, by which time Hitler had moved into the bunker. Overcome with paranoia and quite delusional, he clung to the hope that the city might be saved, but there was no realistic chance of escape. Hitler made his final trip to the world above on April 20 to award Iron Crosses to members of the Hitler Youth. Nine days later, he married Eva Braun in the map room before dictating his last will and testament. The following day the newlyweds killed themselves in the bunker, and were cremated in a shell hole in front of one of its emergency exits. The following day, Goebbels and his wife Magda murdered their children and then committed suicide.
By that point, the city was flooding with Soviet forces intent on wreaking revenge on their most bitter of enemies. When Red Army troops uncovered the bunker on May 2, they discovered at least a dozen bodies within its confines. Though they would subsequently raze both the Old and New Chancellery buildings to the ground, the Führerbunker remained largely unharmed except for some flooding.
It was a long-held aim of post-war German governments to ensure the bunker did not become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. In 1947, the Soviets attempted to blow it up completely, but only the separation walls suffered real damage. Much of the bunker lay in land that came under East German governance in the post-war era. Under Moscow’s influence, East Germany did a characteristically effective job of erasing the site from the historical record. Although an attempt to blow up the remaining parts of the bunker ended in failure in 1959, the area became neglected and largely forgotten.
Building works in the locality in the 1980s led to further destruction of the Führerbunker’s concrete canopy, a job undertaken efficiently and without publicity. A further section was discovered during preparations for a 1990 concert celebrating German reunification by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd. However, it was promptly sealed up by the city authorities. Subsequent road and building projects (including the construction of housing for regional administrators) further hid whatever still remains beneath the ground. Even the Info Box, one of Berlin’s leading tourist attractions in the 1990s, failed to mention the location of the site, although the attraction itself was within view of it.
As time passes, the argument grows that to recognize what is left of the bunker is not to glorify its chief builder. Other important locations from the war, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau or the Topography of Terror Museum on the site of the former SS and Gestapo headquarters, have proved valuable in teaching new generations about the horrors of the period. What is left of the Führerbunker is uncertain, but it is likely that some sections remain in place, should it ever be decided to open them up for historical study. In the meantime, since 2006 the location has been marked by a simple information board erected in the middle of a drab car park, some 200 meters (660 ft) from the city’s Holocaust Memorial.
1 TYRANT’S END A view of the Reich Chancellery gardens, with an entrance to the Führerbunker visible on the left. It was here, in a crater, that Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, were cremated after they had committed suicide in April 1945.
2 NOTHING TO SEE A nondescript Berlin car park now covers the area containing the Führerbunker’s remnants. There is little to indicate the significant role the site played in 20th century history.
