Berlin row grows over fate of Hitler’s bunker site
Berlin wants flats above Hitler’s bunker, but preservationists say burying the site a second time would erase one of the capital’s most sensitive Nazi-era remnants.
Berlin officials want to build flats on the site of Adolf Hitler’s wartime bunker in the city centre, reopening a fight over whether the ground beneath the former Reich Chancellery should be redeveloped or kept as a warning from Germany’s past. Opponents say the location should be preserved, or at least fully documented, because it remains one of Berlin’s most sensitive Nazi-era sites.
The Führerbunker sat about 8.5 metres underground in the ministerial gardens flanking the Reich Chancellery, and it was there that Hitler killed himself on 30 April 1945. That end point has long given the site a particular weight in Berlin, where the physical remains of the Nazi period are handled with unusual caution because they are bound up with both remembrance and the risk of turning atrocity into spectacle.
Germany has faced that problem before. Allied Command decided in July 1946 to demolish and destroy military installations in Berlin, and the British occupiers began tearing down the first bunker in Spandau in April 1947. Many of the structures proved stubbornly resistant because they had been built with massive reinforced concrete, and in the 1950s the remaining West Berlin bunker ruins were largely removed only with tonnes of explosives.
That history is part of the current row. The city wants to use the land for housing in the centre of the capital, while campaigners argue that a new apartment block would close off a tangible link to how the Nazi state ended. Their case draws strength from Berlin’s wider memory landscape, where underground World War II air-raid shelters, Cold War nuclear shelters and other subterranean sites have become part of a large historical and so-called dark-tourism economy.
The dispute also reflects a familiar German dilemma: some places associated with dictatorship are cleared away, some are documented, and some remain because demolition is too difficult or the consequences of removal are too blunt. In Berlin, where bunkers were widely destroyed after the war but not entirely erased, the fight over Hitler’s bunker site is less about one plot of land than about how much visible trace a city should leave of the crimes committed beneath it.
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