A DAY NOT TO REMEMBER - THE IGNOMINIOUS END OF A WOULD-BE WORLD DICTATOR

Telegraph.co.uk Thursday 30 April 2015

Adolf Hitler suicide 70 years on: what became of Nazi leader's bunker

All that remains of Adolf Hitler's Berlin Führerbunker, near the Brandenburg Gate, is a small information board next to a car park

The site of Hitler's World War Two bunker in Berlin Photo: Alamy

By Justin Huggler in Berlin
6:00AM BST 30 Apr 2015

In central Berlin, not far from the Brandenburg Gate, there is a small patch of waste ground next to a car park, where groups of tourists gather.

Apart from a simple, low-key information board, there is nothing to indicate why this prime patch of real estate remains unoccupied.

This is as close as you can get to the spot where, 70 years ago on Thursday, Adolf Hitler committed suicide.

Beneath the scruff grass lie the remains of the Führerbunker, where Hitler saw out the final months of the Second World War.

Many of Berlin's wartime bunkers are open as tourist attractions today, but not this one.

There will be no ceremonies or memorials on Thursday to mark the anniversary of the death of the man who promised a Thousand-Year Reich, but brought the Holocaust and the Second World War.

• Anyone for a day out at Hitler’s bunker?

Occasionally, flowers are left at the site by neo-Nazis or Hitler sympathisers, but they are quickly kicked over or removed.

A short walk away, an entire city block is given up to the Holocaust Memorial.

Little remains of the bunker, best known to generations today as the setting for the notorious scene in the film Downfall that launched a thousand YouTube parodies.

A few corridors are thought to survive, sealed off from the public. Curiously the complex survived largely intact until the late eighties, when it was excavated and destroyed.

Where the car park is today Hitler's Reich Chancellery once stood at the heart of the city he planned to remodel as Welthaupt, or World Capital, Germania.

Originally intended as an air raid shelter, it was extended into a large complex in the closing stages of the war, into which Hitler retreated as Nazi Germany collapsed all around him.

The last time he is known to have emerged was to hand out Iron Crosses to Hitler Youth and SS members in the Chancellery Garden.

The Chancellery buildings were levelled by occupying Soviet troops after the war. The bunker's ventilation towers were destroyed, but much of the complex was simply sealed off.

Further demolition followed in 1959, but the site, close to the Berlin Wall, became part of the border area and was left largely undeveloped.

It was not until the late eighties that the communist East German regime, then in its final years, began building apartment blocks on the site in an attempt to wipe out all traces of its Nazi past.

The bunker, where Hitler married Eva Braun and shortly afterwards shot himself dead, was excavated and largely destroyed.

Today, there is nothing to see but the patch of waste ground and the information board.

But, in a curious postscript, a company is planning to build a replica of the bunker hundreds of miles away, in western Germany, as a tourist attraction.

The "Top Secret" museum's Führerbunker, which has been condemned by historians as tasteless and inappropriate, is due to open in the autumn.

And they've learned NOTHING. His modern-day fans are still strutting around, still murdering innocent people - this time with the SUPPORT of the US and others.

I hope the whole damned lot of them rot in Hell with their feuhrer.

bb1 wrote:And they've learned NOTHING. His modern-day fans are still strutting around, still murdering innocent people - this time with the SUPPORT of the US and others.

I hope the whole damned lot of them rot in Hell with their feuhrer.

No comment except re your spelling - Führer or Fuehrer (when the umlaut is not available) not feuhrer. LL

Apologies! German is one language I have never even tried to learn.

bb1 wrote:Apologies! German is one language I have never even tried to learn.

A pity, as German is very easy for English speakers, so many of the words are similar as both languages are closely related. Example, Mein Haus ist dein Haus - my house is your house. LL

It was definitely more enjoyable and easier than Latin, LL.

lily wrote:It was definitely more enjoyable and easier than Latin, LL.

Oh, yes, Latin hic, haec, hoc - what an ugly language!!!! I can still speak some, but prefer not to. LL

O me miserum!  

Amo, amas, amat......

Much better, Bonny.  

lily wrote:O me miserum!  

   Have a big LL