Berlin: Hitler's last refuge holds allure 60 years after war's end
On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin, escaping punishment for the Holocaust, World War II and countless other crimes.Since that time, the subterranean compound has held a dark allure, first for the Soviet troops who conquered the city, then for their British and American allies, and later for historians and filmmakers.
This year, German director Oliver Hirschbiegel retold the tale of Hitler’s last days with mistress Eva Braun and other close associates in the highly acclaimed film, “Downfall.” And with the 60th anniversary of the end of the war being marked in events around Europe this month, there is renewed interest in what happened to the man who had a large role in starting it.
But don’t go to Berlin expecting to find Hitler’s final home. Its ruins lie beneath an unmarked parking lot near where the garden of Hitler’s Berlin office once stood near Wilhemstrasse and Vosstrasse. The lot faces a block of shoddy, centrally located apartments built by the Communists during Berlin’s postwar period as a divided city.
“It’s unimaginable that there is nothing here to mark the spot,” says Klaus Dieter Jurk, a local bunker expert and tour guide. “You can’t just push aside 12 years of German history.”
Jurk, and a small group of like-minded historians and journalists, want to see the city acknowledge the existence of one of its most significant historical sites.
For them, it’s all about Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, an awkward word that means “coming to terms with the past.” While the city has put up many monuments to mark the dark aspects of German history, including a new Holocaust memorial one block from the bunker, many of the Nazis’ actual administrative buildings and compounds remain hidden in plain sight.
Even distinctly fascist constructions such as the Finance Ministry, originally Hermann Göring’s Air Ministry, contain no information about their first occupants. Instead, it bears a plaque and several multistory posters detailing the building’s role in a failed 1953 uprising against East Germany’s Soviet-backed regime.
Sven Felix Kellerhoff, a Berlin journalist and author of “The Führer Bunker,” which describes the site and the buildings that surround it in detail, also finds the amnesia strange.
“When my book was first published, I asked the Berlin Senate to consider putting some information up at the site, but I never received an answer from them,” he said.
After repeated inquires for this article, a spokeswoman for the Berlin Senate’s Archaeological office sent an e-mail saying the issue “was never considered” and that the office does not consider it appropriate to place historical markers on such spots.
Hitler ordered the construction of the bunker in January 1943, following a bombing raid of Berlin by the British. He wanted a compound strong enough to withstand the largest bunker- busting bombs of the day, so its 11½-foot-thick steel reinforced walls were built to support a 12½-foot-thick ceiling of the same material.
The bunker was completed in 1944, but Hitler did not move in until early March 1945, with the U.S. Army pushing hard on the Western front and the Red Army closing in on the east.
According to some blueprints, the bunker consisted of 29 rooms, including bedrooms for Hitler, Braun and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, among others.
In the bunker, Hitler organized the defense of the city, becoming mentally and physically weaker as the Soviets closed in. By late April, he was said to be a ghost of a man, commanding phantom armies in a lost cause.
The site of the bunker was not always hidden. In the initial days after World War II, the bunker became a popular attraction for both ordinary Allied soldiers and prominent officials, such as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who stopped by in the summer of 1945.
The Soviets soon grew tired of Western visitors coming into their sector, so in 1947 they decided to blow it up. But, according to Kellerhoff’s book, the demolition failed — not really a surprise considering the thickness of its ceiling and walls.
A second attempt to dynamite the ruins in 1959 also failed, and after the Berlin Wall went up two years later, the area became part of the no man’s land near the border region.
The East Germans decided to build apartments for trusted Communist Party members there in 1984, and construction began in 1988.
Jurk was one of a small number of bunker enthusiasts determined to have a look at what the builders unearthed.
He obtained an East German construction worker’s uniform, sewed a camera inside and slipped onto the site.
“If I had gotten caught taking photos in a border zone it would have been pretty serious,” Jurk recalls. “They would have given me a few years for certain.”
The collapse of the East German dictatorship a year later gave him ample opportunity to explore the area around Hitler’s former headquarters.
He discovered a warren of bunkers and underground tunnels, some of which led to the basements of Nazi-era buildings long since torn down.
Even a section of the new Holocaust memorial is built atop Goebbels’ bunker.
“Of course, no one is proud of our history,” Jurk says. “But we can’t just pretend it never happened.”
Alfred Kueppers is a journalist based in Frankfurt, Germany. He can be reached at akuep1@yahoo.com.
