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Berlin Führerbunker

The rear entrance to the Führer Bunker in the garden of the Reich Chancellery - July 1947.

The current Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße formerly "In den Ministergärrten"

"In den Ministergärten" now Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße and the area became known as the administrative center of both the Kingdom of Prussia and Hitler's German rich. From the end of the 19th century until 1945, it was home for many important government buildings, including the Chancellery, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda).

The history behind Hitler's Bunker - Sign posted by "Berliner Unterwelten" at the parking lot which hides the remains of the bunker

The association Berliner Untervelten was founded on 22 May 1997 to prevent further bunker facilities from being destroyed or filled in during the building boom that began after the fall of the wall in 1989 and reunification in 1990.

The New Reich Chancellery's underground bunker after it was uncovered during demolition work to make way for a new apartment complex in 1987. In 1938, Hitler ordered Albert Speer to construct new buildings because the old Reich Chancellery had become too small. - Photo Robert Conrad

Churchill visited the former Reich Chancellery July 1945

Forbidden Photos: Secret Shots of Hitler's Bunker

By Christoph Gunkel - Article found in "Spiegel International" and published 04.06.2013, 17.44

From 1987, Robert Conrad risked his freedom when he secretly photographed Adolf Hitler's dilapidated bunker in what was then East Berlin. Disguised as a construction worker, he snuck in around 30 times and only now has he revealed his work.

Practica camera 35 mm


More or less flooded bunker rooms - Photo Robert Conrad

Robert Conrad knew things could get uncomfortable. There were the guards, the explosions, the dark tunnels. He could easily stumble across a detonation in progress, run into a policeman or even land himself in jail. And yet, in the summer of 1987, Conrad donned a construction worker's coverall and a hardhat and hid his camera, a Praktica model with a 35-millimeter wide-angle lens, in a leather shoulder bag of the type carried by many workers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) at the time. To lend his disguise verisimilitude, Conrad made sure a Thermos jug could be seen poking out of his bag. He wanted to be absolutely sure to look just like any normal construction worker. Thus disguised, the photographer snuck up to the fence around the construction site on Berlin's Otto Grotewohl Strasse and climbed over the barrier. Once inside, he had to suppress the impulse to start running. "I walked very slowly across the site, as if on eggshells, so no one would notice me," he recalls. Conrad was uneasy. Where was the entrance into this underworld of dark concrete ruins that had been buried for decades under Berlin's streetså Would he be able to climb down into the infamous "Führer's bunker," where Adolf Hitler shot himself in April 1945?

1. Rusty steel cabinets and barrels standing in water inside the New Reich Chancellery bunker. - Photo Robert Conrad

Now, some 26 years later, Conrad holds one of the photographic slides for which he risked his neck back then thoughtfully up to the light and makes sure to dispel any possible misunderstandings. "I didn't go to the bunkers hunting for relics or out of some secret admiration for the Nazi regime," he says. The office Conrad has just moved to in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district is still filled with the scent of freshly laid floorboards. The historic building's stucco ceiling was renovated just a few days before, revealing Art Nouveau decorations from 1905. It's a fitting space for Conrad, an architectural photographer with a passion for preventing old things from disappearing. Essentially, Conrad and his camera have been doing precisely that for decades. Even as a teenager in the 1980s, Conrad traveled all over East Germany photographing the historic half-timbered buildings that the country's Socialist Unity Party (SED) was systematically tearing down and replacing with monotonous prefabricated concrete apartment blocks. As a form of protest against forgetting history, Conrad lived illegally in buildings slated for demolition and saw himself as a chronicler of the government's mania for destruction. He got in plenty of trouble for it, too. Police interrogated him for hours, threatened him and rifled through his apartment. Studying at university was then out of the question for Conrad, so he got by doing a variety of simple jobs -- and defiantly continued to take photographs.

1. A bunker room in the New Chancellery. 2. Rusty steel cabinets standing in water inside the New Reich Chancellery bunker.- Photo Robert Conrad

It was during this time that the nearly forgotten remains of the Nazis' bunker complex were rediscovered in Berlin. In 1986, the East German government made plans to erect a large apartment complex on the corner of Vossstrasse and Otto Grotewohl Strasse, now known as Wilhelmstrasse. In order for those Socialist blocks to go up, concrete from a darker past had to be demolished first. The ground under the construction site turned out to contain not only Adolf Hitler's former bunker, but also the remains of an air raid shelter used by the Neue Reichskanzlei, or New Reich Chancellery, and the foreign ministry. This required the excavation of massive reinforced concrete walls located up to eight meters (26 feet) deep in the ground, which had to be removed and demolished piece by piece, a laborious undertaking. The victorious Red Army had given up on the "Führer's bunker" back in 1947, after Soviet soldiers attempted to blow it up. They were able to destroy the complex's ventilation shafts, collapse interior walls and even cause the four-meter-thick (13-foot-thick) bunker roof to drop by 40 centimeters (15 inches) from the force of the explosion, but the rest held. This was followed by further blasts 12 years later, but then the East German government filled in the entrances to the ruin of Hitler's bunker, dumped dirt on top of the site and let grass grow over the whole thing in the truest sense of the phrase. That's how things remained until the construction project that began in 1986.

1. View from the construction site on Otto Grotewohl Strasse (now Wilhelmstrasse) to buildings from the former Nazi Ministry of Public information and propaganda that survived the war. In the last weeks of the Second World War II Minister Joseph Goebbels retreated with his family into Hitler's neighboring bunker, where they later committed suicide. 2. The construction site - Photo Robert Conrad

A 'Completely Insane Landscape'

"Of course there was nothing in the newspapers about the Nazi bunkers. That was very much a taboo subject, as was everything about the Nazi period," Conrad explains. "Officially, they were just constructing a new residential neighborhood." The photographer himself discovered the bunker ruin only by chance, when his route as an apprentice bus driver took him past it on Otto Grotewohl Strasse. "My seat in the bus was raised, so I could see over the fence into the construction site," he recalls. "Suddenly I saw this completely insane landscape with enormous concrete ruins that had buried for decades protruding out of the ground." Exposed by the construction, the underground complex now looked as if it were an aboveground bunker. His photographer's hunting instinct was instantly awakened. He asked around about the history of the site, read what little available information he could find about the underground Nazi bunker and had friends in West Germany send him more material. He started hanging around the site, photographing from the outside the concrete expanse, huge excavating equipment and some of the demolition blasts. He also engaged construction workers leaving the site in innocuous conversation. "I was dying to find out if they needed a special permit in order to be there," Conrad explains. He was relieved to learn that access to the site didn't appear to be under particularly restrictive control. It seemed his plan might work.

A staircase at the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also on the construction site and was also frequently visited by Conrad. - Photo Robert Conrad

Photographing with fear

Things went smoothly to start with. On his first visit, Conrad found himself in the New Reich Chancellery bunker. He worked hectically, worried he might be caught at any time, taking pictures of rusted ventilation pipes, tiled walls, safes and projectiles. Despite the haste with which he had to work, Conrad is critical of his work as a younger photographer. "Those weren't my best shots. Today I would go about it much more systematically," he says. But at the time, he simply pointed his camera anywhere he could. The most important thing was not getting caught. "My greatest fear was that they would assume I was trying to escape," Conrad says. The concern wasn't an unreasonable one, since the site was located in direct proximity to the border with West Berlin. "As far as I knew, parts of the labyrinth of bunkers ran along under the Wall and even extended into the death strip." Yet the construction site continued to exert its pull on Conrad like an addictive drug. Since no one noticed him the first time, he went again. And again and again, perhaps 30 times in total, though he no longer remembers exactly. Sometimes months passed between his visits, and sometimes just a few days. It was also a race against the clock, as the excavators dug deeper and the workers removed more reinforced steel. Why wasn't Conrad able to stop going there? He considers the question, gazing at the slides spread out on the lightbox in his Berlin office, then says: "Being down there and hearing the echo of your own footsteps, discovering things from a completely distant chapter of history -- it was that feeling of traveling back in time that fascinated me so much." So he kept pushing his luck. Once he was scared half to death when he suddenly came across another man in the Reichskanzlei bunker. "It was unbelievable," he says. "He was sitting there as calm as could be with a miner's lamp, drawing the gloomy scene on a small easel," Conrad says. Was this a kindred spirit, another person interested in capturing architecture before its destruction, no matter how despicable the behavior of the people who originally constructed itæt To this day, Conrad isn't sure. "We talked to each other, but the mistrust was too great," he says. "He didn't dare to ask me why I was there, and I didn't dare to ask him either." It made for a grotesque scene: Two men holding their tongues out of fear of the communist dictatorship, inside a Nazi bunker. After a brief pause, both went on about their work, one with his camera and the other with his charcoal.

These exposed elements of the bunkers are framed by the former Nazi Ministry of Public Information and Propaganda and an East German state publishing house in another building formerly used by the Nazis - Photo Robert Conrad Conrad

Konfiskerede film

A couple of visits in, Conrad finally found the entrance to the infamous bunker where Hitler and his inner circle barricaded themselves when the Red Army reached Berlin. The complex consisted of a first bunker constructed in 1935 and then the actual, far more bombproof "Führer's bunker," which wasn't finished until 1944. But Conrad was disappointed by what he found. Neither part of the bunker complex contained the "original setting of insanity" he had hoped to see. "Too many Allied soldiers and curious Berliners had already been through there in the first years after the war, and all of them took souvenirs," he explains. Conrad certainly found some items: decaying bits of furniture, projectiles, the epaulet of a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer, a gas mask and empty sparkling wine bottles. But the "Führer's bunker" itself, constructed from 1943 to 1944, was so flooded with water that it was hardly possible to get inside. It also now consisted of just one large room, since the Soviet army's demolition blasts had broken down the interior walls. In the first bunker, though, the one constructed in 1935, Conrad believed he had found the room where Magda Goebbels poisoned herself and her children with cyanide shortly before the end of the war. "The bunk beds were halfway collapsed, rusted and standing in the groundwater," he says. It was after this visit that Conrad was caught for the first time. Police examined the contents of his leather shoulder bag, patted him down and quickly found the film he had hidden in his socks. But to his surprise, they gave him comparatively little trouble. They didn't accuse him of trying to escape East Germany either. "They didn't really understand what I was doing down there, they just told me I should cut out the nonsense," he says. But Conrad didn't cut it out. In fact, the fake construction worker was caught four more times and had a dozen rolls of film confiscated.

Conrad also took photos of the demolition work at the site from the outside. Here, clouds of smoke arise from explosions that were used to clear the area for new construction. - Photo Robert Conrad

A Dream Come True

Then, in 1989, it was all over. The removal work ended and the rest of the "Führer's bunker" -- the floor slab and the external walls -- were filled in with rubble, sand and gravel. Just a few months later came the demise of another massive concrete construction -- the fall of the Berlin Wall made Conrad's dream of studying architecture, denied to him in the GDR, possible at last. In his spare time, though, Conrad remained true to his old passion. To this day, he seeks out lost worlds, photographing abandoned barracks, apartment blocks and factories shortly before they are torn down. These days, though, he no longer has to disguise himself as a construction worker. DThis article originally appeared in German on einestages.de, SPIEGEL ONLINE's history portal. Translated from German by Ella Ornstein and into Danish by me.

The construction site- Foto Robert Conrad

U-bahn:

Mohrenstraße eller Unter den Linden

Links to:

"Sneaking into Hitler's Bunker" - Spiegel International

Historien om Hitlers Bunker

 

 

Berlin is always worth a visit - summer or winter - but where to go? Here are some slightly unusual and very different suggestions for places I like to go.

Interesting places

A B C

 Ny Tabel

"Beelitz-Heilstätten" - Old military hospital

Bendlerblock" - Memorial and museum

"Berlin Untervelten" - Berlin's "Underworld"

"Bernauer Straße" - About the Berlin Wall etc.

"Bornholmer Straße - Former border crossing east/west

"Boxhagener Platz - Green area and flea market"

D E F

Ny Tabel

"Europacenter" - Shopping center etc.

"Flakturm Humboldthain" - Bunker facility WW2

"Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg" - Busy airport

"Flughafen Berlin Tempelhof" - Recreational area.

"Escape tunnels between East and West Berlin" - Cold War

"Friedhof Invalidenhof" - Soldiers Cemetery

"Führerbunker" - History of the bunker. Primarily post-war

"Not finished yet

"Not finished yet

G H I J K

Ny Tabel

"Old Danish Embassy" - Tiergarten

Gedenkstätte Plötzensee" - Memorial

"Glienicker Brücke"- Dividing East/ West

- "Pallasstrasse bunker" Bunker i centrum

" Weissensee Jewish Cemetery - Jewish cemetery

Karlshorst - German-Russian Museum"

L M N O P Q R S

"Majakowskiring"
GDR elite in Pankow

Prenzlauer Berg"

- Memorial

"Schöneberg town hall" - JFK tale"

"Schwerbelastungskörper" - Pressure gauge

" Friedhof Grunewald-Forst - Cemetery for suicides

SS residences Zehlendorf

S T U V X Y Z

"Stasimuseum" - Stasimuseum

Teufelsberg" - NSA in Grunewald

"Tiergarten" - The Nordic Embassies"

"Tiergarten - Siegessäule" 67 meter tall victory column

"Villa Riefenstahl - Leni Riefenstahls House

"Zionskirche Prenzlauerberg - Where Bonhoeffer preached

Recreational areas:

"Grunewald"
- Berlins largest green areas

Strandbad Wannsee"
- Europe's largest lake bath

"Tempelhofer Park"
- Formerly Tempelhof Airport

"Tiergarten"
- Berlin's largest city park

"Volkspark Friedrichshein - Recreational area

"Volkspark Jungfernheide" - Recreational area

Food and drinks:

Centreret Tabel

"Biergarden am Neuen See" in the Tiergarten.

Biergarden "Prater" - From 1837 and the oldest

Biergarden "Schleusenkrug", "Biergarden in Tiergarten".

"Mustafas Gemüse Kebap" - known all over Berlin

"Restaurant Zillemarkt" - Unfortunately closed by now

"Zur letzten Instanz" - Oldest restaurant in Berlin

Postcard Berlin, Sebastianstraße, Berliner Mauer

Shortcut to postcards of the Berlin Wall

Berlin at War

A recommendation

Berlin's landmark is a bear

I have visited Berlin for many years. The first time was in the late 70s with a school class where the stay made such a big impression on me that I have been coming there very often ever since. The first times I visited the city, it was brutally divided into East and West and separated by the famous and infamous Berlin Wall, which from one day to the next separated families and friends.

The history of the construction of the Berlin Wall is long and begins in the division of Germany after World War II, where the four victors and allies - the Soviet Union, the United States, England and France divided the country between them. The capital, Berlin, from which the Allies were to jointly rule Germany, was also divided into four occupation zones, which each Allied ruled, however, in accordance with the overall agreements the four Allies had jointly

But the marriage was not a happy one and, in short, the differences between the United States, England and France, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other, became so big that cooperation was almost impossible.

The lack of cooperation led the Soviet Union to voluntarily decide to form the state of the GDR in their part of Germany, where West Berlin were located - now as a desert island in the east.

In the GDR, however, they had the problem that many of its inhabitants would rather live in the somewhat richer "West", where the Americans, unlike the Russians, provided financial assistance for the reconstruction after the "total war". In the Soviet-occupied German territories, the Russians instead dismantled most of the production equipment and moved it to the Soviet Union, and to make matters worse, the Germans were also ordered to pay war damages.

As the flow of refugees from the GDR increased, often by several thousand people a day, the then government of the GDR felt compelled, with the consent of the Soviet Union, to confine its population, otherwise within a few years there would be so few people left in the state no longer really would work. The flight to the West among young people, skilled and highly educated was so that the situation was unsustainable and something had to be done.
The GDR had otherwise promised its population that after some hard years of toil and toil, the reward would come, but when you could see, not least via western TV, how the nation actually fell further and further behind in relation to the west, many began to doubt truth value of the statement. For the same reason, large parts of the population began to seep to the west and this could most easily happen via Berlin, where the borders between the various sectors were still open.

 When a GDR citizen had decided to become a "republican refugee", he or she typically dressed like people from the West and then subsequently bought a train ticket to Berlin , if one did not already live there. In Berlin, the trip typically continued by "U-bahn" to West Berlin. During such an escape, no significant luggage could be included, as one would easily be recognized as what one was - a refugee - and then taken to the police station for questioning and imprisonment. Although there was free passage to West Berlin, many East German border guards were posted at the border and were largely solely responsible for keeping an eye on any refugees.

The iconic photo of the soldier who escaped from the GDR to the west

Well arrived in West Berlin, you had to sign up in e.g. the Marienfelde refugee camp to apply for a residence permit. Here one was interrogated and later typically assigned to a job according to qualifications and an apartment. Many former GDR citizens have passed through Marienfelde, where there now also is a museum. It is estimated that approx. 1.35 million people passed through the camp in Marienfelde until the fall of the wall in 1989.

West Berlin was a thorn in the side of the so-called communist regimes, which on several occasions tried to get the West Allies to leave Berlin and thus let it become part of the GDR, but when that failed, the Berlin Wall or "Antifaschistischer Schutzwall" as it was officially called in the GDR was built in 1961.

"Notaufnahmelager" Marienfelde (refugee camp)

The "Schandmauer" - or wall of shame as it was called in most of the western world - came to surround the whole of West Berlin. The day of shame - 13 August 1961 - was the day when a 41 km long wall was started and further developed the following years right up to the fall of the wall in 1989.

Memorial

It is estimated that approx. 14,000 border soldiers guarded the wall - which by the way consisted of several walls - even though 860,000 mines had been laid, more than 300 watchtowers erected, trenches built and more than 600 well-trained watchdogs exposed. Throughout the period from 1961 - 1989, it is estimated that there were more than 5,000 escape attempts and that a little more than 3,000 people were apprehended. Some of these escape attempts took place through the 57 escape tunnels dug under the Berlin Wall. In all, it is believed that 190 died during escape attempts.

World War II and the Berlin Wall - even after its dismantling - have of course left their mark on the city of Berlin and there is no doubt that these events have had a colossal historical significance, but one must not forget that Berlin is also an extremely interesting and modern city, where life is lived and where the cultural offerings are enormous.

Wanted