Führerbunker

The Führerbunker in Berlin was Adolf Hitler's last headquarters in the final weeks of World War II. Originally planned as a private air-raid shelter beneath the banquet hall of the old Reich Chancellery, the complex was massively expanded starting in 1943. After an air raid destroyed the chancellery rooms above ground in February 1945, Hitler moved his entire staff and his personal entourage permanently into the underground rooms. Located up to eight meters (about 26 feet) underground, the complex consisted of the so-called Vorbunker and the deeper main bunker. Both sections were designed to be largely self-sufficient, with their own power generators, air filtration systems, and gas-tight airlock doors. The interior rooms, whose floors were laid with white earthenware tiles, housed living and working quarters as well as a telephone exchange and a map room for daily situation briefings.

The last dramatic events of the Nazi regime played out in this enclosed environment. Here in April 1945, Hitler wrote his wills and married Eva Braun, before the two took their own lives on April 30. Joseph and Magda Goebbels and other close confidants such as Martin Bormann also ended their lives in or directly beside the bunker in the following days. After the Wehrmacht's surrender in Berlin, the Red Army occupied the complex. Attempts to blow up the bunker completely in the postwar period partly failed or damaged only the structures above ground. In the late 1980s, during construction work on Wilhelmstraße, the reinforced concrete roof and large parts of the outer walls of the main bunker were removed and the cavities were filled in, so that today only the floor slab and remnants of the walls remain in the ground.

Today the site is no longer accessible to visitors as a museum, since a parking lot now occupies the spot where the bunker once stood. The historical significance of the site is nevertheless preserved by two information boards. One board at the corner of Gertrud-Kolmar-Straße and In den Ministergärten, installed by the association Berliner Unterwelten, marks the exact location of the underground remains and serves to counter popular myths. Another memorial plaque from the Topography of Terror Foundation on Wilhelmstraße commemorates the Reich Chancellery and the bunker as a site of Nazi crimes. These signs allow travelers to reflect on the historical dimension of the site in the context of the surrounding memorials, such as the nearby Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.