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 it? 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.