Hitler's Bunker Still Lies Beneath a Berlin Car Park

The bunker where Adolf Hitler spent the last weeks of World War II is still under central Berlin, about 8.5 metres below a car park. For 61 years after his suicide on 30 April 1945, nothing at the spot said what lay underneath, until a single information board went up on 8 June 2006.

The shelter was dug beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery in 1943 and 1944. According to the Berliner Morgenpost, several thousand tonnes of reinforced concrete were sunk into the ground because Hitler's earlier bunker, with a ceiling 1.6 metres thick, no longer seemed safe enough. He went underground for good in January 1945 as Soviet troops closed in.

Getting rid of it proved harder than building it. Soviet troops blew it up in December 1947, which wrecked much of the interior, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported, but the concrete shell held. The Morgenpost adds that a second attempt in 1959 also failed.

Then the Cold War froze the site in place. The area was razed around 1960 and became part of the East Berlin border zone after the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. Only in 1988 did East Germany manage to tear the bunker down, using special Swedish equipment, and even then only about half of it. What remains is a concrete basin with walls 2 to 4 metres thick, filled with rubble.

In the late 1980s, East Germany built prefabricated apartment blocks on the land. The bunker's roof was removed, the interior was filled with sand and gravel, and the surface became parking for the new buildings. Leaving the spot unmarked was deliberate: officials feared that a marked site would turn into a shrine for neo-Nazis, as Der Spiegel explained.

The silence had a cost. After the 2004 film Downfall (Der Untergang) recreated Hitler's last days, tourists kept asking where the bunker was, and guides filled the gap with myths. Dietmar Arnold of the history society Berliner Unterwelten told Der Spiegel that visitors heard tales of 12 secret levels, an intact bunker and an underground motorway to Tempelhof airport.

Arnold's group, which runs tours of Berlin's old air-raid shelters, lobbied for years and finally won permission to put up a sign, with support from the city's urban development department and its monuments office. The board, paid for with donations, stands at the corner of In den Ministergärten and Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße, about 200 metres from the Holocaust Memorial, according to the BBC.

It shows the bunker's layout, archive photos and a chronology in German and English, in a dry, factual tone meant to strip the place of its mystique. "We wanted to demystify the site," Arnold said.

One of the guests at the unveiling had been inside. Rochus Misch, 88, Hitler's former bodyguard and telephone operator, told the Associated Press that he had been down there with Hitler for the last 12 days of the war. He also played down the legend of a grand fortress: Hitler's own room, he said, was just 12 square metres.

Sources: BBC News (2006); Der Spiegel (2006); Berliner Morgenpost (2006); Sydney Morning Herald (2006); Associated Press via HeraldNet (2006). Cover: site of the Führerbunker in Berlin, Richard Mortel, CC BY 2.0._Berlin_(39471658134).jpg).