Abstract
Scholarly debates about the ‘difficult heritage’ associated with National Socialism typically rest with the preservation, memorialization or eradication of the visible remains of the Third Reich. Heritage, though, is more than a tangible place or object. It is also a process of social and cultural engagement where acts of remembrance (or concealment) reflect contemporary politics and social values. The tension between a distinct sense of historical place and the present-day reality of a voided landscape is illustrated keenly through a case study of Adolf Hitler's Berlin Führerbunker. Despite being physically absent from today's cityscape, Hitler's bunker has long generated both concern about the potential for becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site, and curiosity among international tourists, keen to see where the Nazi dictator met his end. Tracing tourist activity since 1945, and exploring recurring efforts to contain, destroy or expose the site, this article posits that the Führerbunker has become an effective countermemorial, its very absence from the contemporary cityscape sparking public discussions among visitors and fostering a critical, grassroots reflection upon the challenges of handling legacies of dictatorship.
Adolf Hitler's Berlin Führerbunker is one of the most culturally iconic perpetrator sites in Europe. Indelibly associated with the Götterdämmerung of the Third Reich – the fruitless efforts to defend Germany from the advancing Red Army and the eventual suicide of the Nazi leader; this subterranean headquarters has been represented in numerous films, museum exhibitions and even virtual reality reconstructions. 1 Yet any trace of the bunker is absent from the physical, urban landscape. The space it once occupied is now nothing more than a car park, surrounded by residential housing. At first glance, this area of Berlin appears humdrum. It is a site, though, that illuminates the impact of Cold War division and reunification upon the city, offers an intriguing juxtaposition with the surrounding memorial landscape, and continues to generate discussion over the demarcation or reuse of perpetrator spaces.
Scholarly debates about the ‘difficult heritage’ associated with National Socialism typically rest with the preservation, memorialization or eradication of the visible remains of the Third Reich such as the NSDAP parade grounds in Nuremberg, with examples of fascist architecture such as Tempelhof airport, or with former concentration camps and other sites of terror. 2 Heritage, though, is more than a tangible place or object. It is also a process of social and cultural engagement where acts of remembrance (or concealment) reflect ‘contemporary cultural and social values, debates and aspirations’ and, indeed, changing political milieux. 3 The fate of Hitler's bunker encapsulates the dramatic changes wrought in Berlin since 1945 and the process of working through the ‘double past’ of first Nazi and then East German dictatorship. 4 It also represents the tension between a distinct sense of historical place and the present-day reality of a voided landscape. It is, in the words of one national German newspaper editorial, ‘historically contaminated land’. 5
Given its notoriety as the scene of Hitler's suicide, the Führerbunker has long generated concerns over its potential to become a shrine for neo-Nazi pilgrims, prompting efforts to contain, hide or destroy the site entirely. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, access to this area was guarded closely by Soviet soldiers. Then, between 1961 and 1989, the site became further cut off from the rest of the city with the construction of the so-called death strip – a veritable ‘no man's land’ that separated the inner and outer sections of the Berlin Wall and ran directly above the bunker. The symbolism was potent: Nazism – like this barren wasteland – was dead; Hitler's last residence had no significance in a city that was literally rebuilding itself upon a legacy of antifascist resistance. 6 Under Soviet occupation and then under the GDR, attention turned to fashioning a new architectural identity, one that showcased ideological strength and innovative, modern ways of living. As newly-appointed East Berlin mayor Arthur Werner remarked just days after the war, ‘Hitler made Berlin into a city of ruination. We will make Berlin into a city of work and progress’. 7 While some former Nazi buildings, including Goering's Aviation Ministry, were repurposed due to their valuable office space, the Reich Chancellery was considered tainted ground, a space beyond ‘rehabilitation’. 8 The Chancellery buildings, already heavily damaged by the war, were razed and, between 1947 and 1988, Hitler's bunker was subjected to repeated demolition operations.
Yet despite these measures, the bunker remained an object of significant public speculation and curiosity. Between 1945 and 1946, it was a destination for a rather privileged set of tourists: Allied leaders, journalists and soldiers who either formed part of officially sanctioned tours of the destroyed seat of Nazi power, or who bribed, evaded or called in favours from Soviet guards to access the bunker. A furtive form of tourism then persisted during the Cold War when thrill-seeking western tourists used observation platforms in Potsdamer Platz to look over the Berlin Wall and steal a glimpse of the spot where Hitler died. Today, the bunker is very much on the Berlin tourist trail – even though the only visible clue to its presence is an information board erected in 2006. As visitors vacillate between relief and disappointment at this state of affairs, the Führerbunker becomes the impetus for an ongoing, critical grassroots reflection on handling the difficult heritage of dictatorship.
In assessing the peculiar magnetism exerted by this site, this article draws upon research methodologies from thanotourism – the study of visits made to sites associated with mass or individual death, places of incarceration, or simulations or re-enactments associated with ideas of death. 9 As Philip Stone puts it, the ‘central component of dark tourism is the (re)presentation and touristic experience of death and dying’. 10 Within the modern German context, such studies have encompassed a variety of Holocaust sites, exploring visitor motivations, expectations, behaviours and emotional responses. 11 Here, the temptation may be to focus purely on the contemporary, to offer case studies of recent activity through personal field observations and post-visit interviews with tourists. Hitler's bunker, however, merits what Clare Copley terms a ‘palimpsestic’ reading: recognizing the layers of meaning that have been attached to this site over time; exploring the changing nature of tourist activity and, indeed, the competing efforts to mark or obscure it within tourist literature. 12 In the process, we can also observe Nadia Bartolini's concept of ‘resurfacing’ – moments when the Führerbunker suddenly garnered new waves of public interest and excited intense debate as to its heritage value. 13 On occasion, this included a very literal re-emergence from the depths of the city as construction workers disturbed the ground around the former Reich Chancellery complex.
Accordingly, this article aligns postwar maps and guidebook entries, newspaper sources, photographs, oral testimonies and memoirs to piece together changing representations of the bunker and trace how the very idea of ‘Hitler's lair’ has been built up in the public imagination since 1945. There is a particular emphasis here on Anglo-American sources, partly to replicate the external tourist gaze, and partly because German media commentators have been quick to attribute the 2006 installation of the information board very specifically to an increase in foreign (especially British and American) tourist activity around the site. Alongside these materials, the article also draws upon netnography to analyse contemporary Tripadvisor reviews of the bunker.
Defined by Robert V. Kozinets as a form of ethnography that examines online cultures, netnography reflects the rapid increase in popular access to the Internet since the 1990s, and the related growth in social media and online communities. 14 While much of the initial research in this area comprised anthropological investigations into virtual interactions and online behavioural patterns, it has expanded to encompass the construction of user knowledge, including the development of cultural memory, the entanglements between historical fact and legends, and popular engagement with specific heritage sites. 15 Tracing tourist responses articulated on Tripadvisor permits observation of the recurring expressions of astonishment, disappointment or bemusement as modern-day visitors encounter the Führerbunker location for the first time and provides insights into the ways in which lay audiences start to recognize, and wrestle with, concepts of ‘difficult’ heritage.
Ultimately, the bunker itself remains inaccessible and invisible. It is a space devoid of any detailed exhibition, visitor centre or other conventional trappings of a tourist destination. The fact that people continue to seek it out, therefore, demonstrates two things. First, the macabre fascination with Hitler's demise cannot be extinguished easily. His fate continues to generate survival myths and it is perhaps no wonder that many people feel drawn to the spot where he was last seen. As New Yorker film critic David Denby commented while reviewing the 2005 film Downfall, ‘every decade or so … the dictator has to be hauled out of the ground, propped up and slain again, just to make sure he's dead’. 16 Visiting the bunker is the physical manifestation of this sentiment. In the process, it illustrates Thomas Laqueur's principle that ‘becoming really dead … takes time’. 17 Second, there is no neat ‘end point’ to discussions about difficult heritage. Germany has come to recognize that engaging with remnants of an uncomfortable past is ‘the obviously right and proper thing to do’ and there are, as this article will demonstrate, various commentators who feel that the passage of time has reduced the political danger implicitly posed by the bunker's spectre. 18 But there also remain elements who keep pushing to gain more from the site – to mark it, excavate it, display and touch it. The Führerbunker thus exposes the continued provocation posed by Nazi heritage sites.
To some extent, Hitler's former Berlin bunker constitutes an atypical example of Nazi heritage. Construction was only completed in 1944, and Hitler spent just 105 days within the complex, moving in on 16 January 1945. Accordingly, this is a site associated very much with the final throes of the Nazi regime. By its very nature, it was supposed to be a well-guarded and out-of-sight underground defensive position – an object far removed from the grandiose building plans for the New Reich Chancellery to which the bunker was attached. Furthermore, while the term Führerbunker will be used throughout to refer specifically to the Berlin site, it is worth remembering the generic origins of the phrase. This was not the only Führer headquarters in use during the Second World War, nor was it the sole example of a ‘Hitler bunker’. Indeed, Hitler spent much more of his time overseeing events from either the Berghof, his private, mountain-top residence in Obersalzburg, or the so-called ‘Wolf's Lair’ in East Prussia. These sites had their own underground shelters to protect the Nazi leader, and both left more tangible remains that can be viewed today. 19 The Berlin bunker, of course, gained infamy as the place where it all ended. It was here that Hitler dictated his personal will and political testament, married his long-term companion Eva Braun, and finally committed suicide on 30 April 1945 as advancing Soviet forces surrounded the beleaguered German capital.
The Führerbunker was located beneath the Reich Chancellery complex in central Berlin and actually comprised two sections, built at different stages of the Nazi regime. The Vorbunker (upper bunker) was completed in 1936 and designated as the Reich Chancellery Air Raid Shelter. It was located 1.5 m below the cellar of a large reception room in the Old Reich Chancellery, the traditional seat of the German Chancellor situated on Wilhelmstrasse. In January 1938, Hitler commissioned his architect Albert Speer to create the ‘New’ Reich Chancellery – a more imposing building that was supposed to reflect the power and strength of the Third Reich. The entrance to this was located on the adjacent Vosstrasse. The two Chancellery buildings effectively met at right angles to one another and enjoyed a shared garden. As Germany's military fortunes changed from 1943, the subterranean section was expanded to create the Führerbunker where Hitler would reside for the last few months of his life. This new set of rooms rested even deeper underground, about 8.5 m below the Old Reich Chancellery, and 120 m north of the New Reich Chancellery. It had greater reinforcements, including a 3-m-thick concrete roof. It was connected to the Vorbunker by a staircase and there were also exits into both the main chancellery buildings and the gardens. It was through the emergency garden exit that Hitler's still-warm corpse was carried for cremation in spring 1945. 20
While conditions within the bunker are generally well-documented through the memoirs and postwar interrogation reports of surviving members of Hitler's inner circle, the events of 30 April–2 May 1945 typically constitute the conclusion of conventional historical narratives; the termination of the bunker's occupancy period equating to an apparent end to its story. Yet almost immediately, the site assumed a new significance for watching Allied audiences as the place of Hitler's demise and, by extension, a symbol of Germany's total defeat. Western media eagerly covered the Red Army's convergence on the Chancellery complex in May 1945, hoping fervently that the Soviets would quickly recover Hitler's corpse from the rubble as definitive proof of his passing. 21 The July 1945 Potsdam Conference then provided an ideal opportunity for western figures to take a closer look for themselves. Respected war correspondent Richard Dimbleby, who had already documented the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was among the earliest British reporters to broadcast from the scene, while political leaders including Winston Churchill were filmed standing triumphantly on the spot. 22 By this point, rumours of a potential Hitler escape were already challenging the public ‘death-by-suicide’ narrative so these high-profile tours were intended to demonstrate, beyond doubt, the hopelessness of the Nazi leader's situation. Churchill would later describe his own visit as ‘best possible first-hand information’ on the Führer's fate. 23 It is also notable that, as soon as the official British Military Intelligence investigation into Hitler's death was published on 1 November 1945, ‘hundreds’ of Allied soldiers ‘swarmed’ upon the site to try and resolve the one outstanding question: what had become of the remains of Hitler's burned body? These ‘unofficial investigators’ scoured the Chancellery gardens, hoping to find ashes, bones or even a makeshift grave to confirm the bunker's status as death scene. 24
The period of 1945–6 constituted the first wave of bunker tourism. Numerous British soldiers recall taking advantage of a temporary Berlin posting to see the site for themselves. Some, like Private Thomas Everson Cann, managed to get there before the Russians sealed the area and experienced ‘quite an interesting evening just looking around the chancellery’, although Cann was left somewhat bemused by the banality of the location where Hitler's body had been burned. ‘That was just outside … just outside the door on a flat pavement type of thing’. 25 RAF officer and interpreter Francis John Venn, meanwhile, resorted to bribing a Soviet guard for access: ‘I went down into it. There was nothing to see, you know, just empty black cells or cell-like rooms’. 26 Among the more ‘official’ visitors during this period were delegations of British members of parliament. Elizabeth Ward, personal assistant to Head of Military Mission in Berlin, was responsible for leading them to the bunker, recalling, ‘that is what they all wanted to see – where Hitler died in the bunker’. 27
Curiosity, however, was also directed towards the manner in which Hitler had lived. Just as twenty-first century media pored excitedly over the golden opulence of the deposed Colonel Gaddafi's palaces in 2011, or, conversely, the pathetic 2003 image of Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole in rural Iraq, so too did the design and contents of the Führerbunker and overhead Chancellery become objects of fascination. Many of the Allied soldiers who explored the site acquired souvenirs in the process. The aforementioned Cann left with a curtain rod bracket; others confessed to taking away cutlery, crockery, table linen or even a carpet. The Illustrated London News ran several picture stories on both the abandoned bunker and the remains of the main Reich Chancellery buildings, and Nazi artefacts ‘became curios for public display. In 1946, for instance, a London exhibition entitled ‘Relics and Realities’ displayed a photostatic copy of Hitler's will (indelibly associated with the bunker), alongside Heinrich Himmler's death mask and Herman Goering's armoured car. 28 In December 1950, however, police in Munich were moved to confiscate a collection of documents that, having been taken from the Berlin Führerbunker by a Soviet officer, were now being offered for sale at high prices. 29 This cautious intervention was a response to the potential reverence attached to Hitler items, but concerns about sparking a National Socialist revival also governed the postwar handling of the bunker itself.
While the Allies drank in the spectacle of the bunker as a site of victory, they were very wary of its allure as a place of mourning for Nazi sympathizers. The desire to prevent shrines was a key feature of wider occupation policy, prompting Control Council Directive No. 2 that demanded the ‘liquidation’ of Nazi monuments and memorials; and the decision, in autumn 1946, to cremate the executed war criminals condemned by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. 30 In a similar vein, the former Reich Chancellery was razed to the ground by Soviet forces, and there was an attempt, in December 1947, to detonate the Führerbunker itself. As Luke Bennett observes, the Allies considered this a site ‘afflicted by a moral contamination which must be contained lest that contagion otherwise escape’. 31 To discourage public interest around the site, the demolition was not announced in advance. When Associated Press journalist Richard Kasischke nonetheless got wind of these measures and tried to photograph the explosion, he was shot at by a sentry. 32 This site was clearly off limits.
The Führerbunker, though, proved a resilient structure. It had withstood flooding and Soviet shelling in spring 1945, and the effects of the 1947 explosives only sufficed to destroy the entranceway and ventilation shaft and collapse some of the interior walls. The main body of the bunker persisted, thanks to all those metres of reinforced concrete. It held, as Bennett notes succinctly, an inherent ‘material resistance’. 33 Three months later, American journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick filed a lengthy report for the New York Times regarding the decaying ruins of the former Chancellery complex, including the continued possibility of being able to ‘look through broken walls at the teetering block of the bunker’. Aside from a small group of children playing amidst the rubble, O’Hare McCormick found the area quite desolate. ‘Nobody’, she declared, ‘shows much interest in this monstrous relic’, especially as the winter weather began to set in. Hitler, concluded the journalist, had become ‘part of the scrap heap’ and fallen ‘out of mind’. 34
O’Hare McCormick's words proved premature. Photographs held by the Berlin Jewish Museum reveal American-Jewish soldiers continuing to seek out the bunker throughout the 1950s – and the site featured on the burgeoning postwar tourist trail, referenced alongside the Brandenburg Gate and the new Russian war memorial during city bus tours. 35 Journalists too, continued to undertake private trips around the area, with one British correspondent reporting, ‘a short distance inside the Soviet sector my driver halted the car. I looked at the ruins of Hitler's bunker, rising jaggedly from a wide expanse of desolation’. 36 Interest was then further piqued with the release of the first cinematic representation of Hitler's death – the Austrian-West German production, Der letzte Akt released in 1955. The Illustrated London News, for example, published another series of photographs of the ‘actual scene’ in Berlin while reminding readers of the recent UK film screenings. 37 Not everyone, though, succeeded in documenting their visit. In 1953, US presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson visited East Berlin but his efforts to photograph the bunker for himself were interrupted by the local police who steered him firmly away from the site. 38
Indeed, it is evident that the East German authorities remained anxious about the bunker's presence. Following the proclamation of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, the clearing away of Nazi ruins across the city became a literal foundation myth for the new state. Walter Ulbricht, then First Secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, declared boldly in 1951, ‘the men and women of the new Germany are clearing away the ruins of the old imperial Germany. From the ruins of the old Germany, a new one arises’. 39 This included a further attempt to eradicate the bunker in 1956. On that occasion, the roof of the Vorbunker was removed, the space below filled with rubble and the surface then grassed over. Crucially, the Führerbunker below remained largely untouched by these actions. One more demolition attempt occurred in 1959 before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 left the area stranded in the ‘Death Strip’. Once again, it had become a very clear ‘no go’ area; contained and shut off from the general public and overseen by patrolling East German border guards.
The bunker was now caught between an official East German silence, and the curiosity of western travellers. Tourist literature produced by the GDR routinely looked forwards, highlighting new initiatives in housing, shopping and recreation and presenting East Berlin as the exemplar of modern living. 40 There was little discussion of the Nazi past. A later walking tour, for instance, suggested numerous ways to navigate the eastern sector of the city while studiously avoiding bringing visitors within close proximity to the Wall. 41 By contrast, the bunker received frequent mention within western circles. Several newspaper articles from the 1960s referenced Hitler's bunker amid a suggested itinerary for travellers to take advantage of a wooden viewing platform, constructed in Potsdamer Platz, that allowed those in the western sector to climb up and gaze in wonder upon the newly divided city. In 1968, reporter Max Barnes described his own visit for the readers of the Bristol Evening Post, admitting that Hitler's bunker had become ‘a tourist attraction although there is precious little to see’. Acknowledging Russian efforts to avoid a shrine, he added, ‘all they have left is an open space with a grassy mound where they filled the bunker in’. 42 A year later, Scottish journalist Doug Pratt prefaced a report on a four-day visit to Berlin with an emotive reflection on looking over and seeing a grassy mound that supposedly marked the spot of Hitler's former headquarters: ‘it was strange to look at the lump of grass in the park and feel no emotion – no satisfaction, no delayed sense of revenge or justice, no feeling at all – when told, “That was Hitler's bunker. That was where he died”’. 43 Brian Ladd points out that the tour guides’ commentary on this matter was not always strictly accurate – ‘by the 1980s, the mound one saw actually marked a different bunker’ – but visitors nevertheless appeared satisfied that, as Ladd puts it, ‘the inexpressible horror of the Third Reich had ended at a place that was now grim, empty, and utterly inaccessible’. 44
It was only in 1987, amid construction plans for a nearby apartment complex, that the East German government made a more concerted effort to expunge the Führerbunker. The concrete ruins were excavated, the remains of the Vorbunker ripped out, and the roof of the deeper Führerbunker broken up and collapsed into the rooms below. The whole structure was then filled with gravel and sand and covered back over. These events caught the eye of East German photographer Robert Conrad, who proceeded to disguise himself as a construction worker, infiltrate the site and snap surreptitious pictures. Conrad revealed his experiences, and some of his photographs, to Der Spiegel in 2013 but despite his thrilling account of trying to dodge the East German police, this demolition attempt was never as secretive as that of 1947. Instead, the local authorities provided ready media access to the site, with East Berlin building chief Erhardt Gisske telling Reuters news agency proudly, ‘we are blowing everything up. Every last bit will be detonated so no keepsake remains’. 45 It was an approach, though, that stood in stark contrast to the activity taking place concurrently just metres away on the other side of the Wall. As both Berlins prepared to mark the city's 750th anniversary, the West was deliberately reaching back into the past with an excavation of the Gestapo headquarters on the former Prinz-Albrecht-Straße – and the legacy of this activity would have profound implications for public discussion of the Führerbunker once the city was made whole again three years later.
The fall of the Wall in November 1989 left Berlin wrestling with dual heritage challenges: how to remember the years of division, and how to deal with lingering traces of the Nazi past. As Carolyn Loeb observes, for West Germans, the opening of the borders ‘re-established connections with layers of Berlin's past whose physical traces lie in the eastern sector of the city’. 46 On an immediate level, this meant that the now-accessible Death Strip became ‘an attractive spot for weekend strolls’, with visitors from the western sector specifically asking where they could find Hitler's bunker. 47 Likewise, at least one UK newspaper seized upon the changed geopolitical situation to run a competition for a three-night, all-inclusive package holiday to Berlin, with the ‘grassy mound’ of Hitler's bunker highlighted prominently within a list of potential attractions. 48 There was discernible excitement about suddenly being able to physically tread upon this part of the city again. In the longer-term, though, questions emerged as to what to do next with this patch of land. As Mirjana Ristic argues, the Death Strip constituted a ‘wound in Berlin's urban fabric’ that ‘embodied’ the authoritarianism, oppression and violence of the GDR. 49 How might this most recent trauma be memorialized? Could the former borderland be repurposed and reintegrated into the fabric of regular city living? What meaning, if any, did Hitler's bunker have in a reunified and rejuvenated urban landscape?
Initially, the handling of the Wall was similar to that of the Führerbunker during the 1940s: the first instinct was to simply tear it down. Much of the material was reused for new construction projects or collected by enterprising individuals to be sold off to tourists as souvenirs. 50 Thereafter, three distinct forms of memorial activity arose with the creation of Mauerpark (1994) – an open green space for recreation and leisure that recalled the previous void of the Death Strip while simultaneously symbolizing the regrowth of the city and the restoration of freedoms for Berliners; the establishment of the Bernauer Strasse memorial (1998) replete with open-air exhibition and preserved sections of the inner and outer wall; and various projects to mark the former route of the Wall around the city through cobblestones and information boards. 51 But throughout this period, the underlying legacy of the Third Reich also continued to make itself felt. The most notable example, in fact, came directly amid celebrations of reunification in 1990. As security workers preparing for a rock concert by Pink Floyd swept the area around the Wall for any remaining mines, they chanced upon the roof of another section of the Nazis’ underground complex: a bunker designed to shelter members of Hitler's elite bodyguard. As journalists were given a brief tour of these rooms, questions quickly arose as to their future preservation. City councillor Thomas Krüger mused that the site might one day become a ‘historic exhibition’ but acknowledged there were widespread concerns about attracting the unwanted attentions of the Far Right. 52 In the meantime, a compromise of sorts was made with material objects recovered from the scene placed on display in the German Historical Museum. Their removal from the bunker in favour of ‘containment’ within a sterile exhibition space was perceived as a means of ‘defusing’ their power. 53
The notion that traces of Nazi heritage lurked beneath sparked renewed public discussion over the extent to which Berlin's post-reunification, urban regeneration could facilitate a more critical engagement with the past. In 1992, the city's chief archaeologist Alfred Kernd’l proposed the former bunker complex be excavated and reconstructed as an underground museum. He acknowledged that such plans would prove financially and psychologically challenging, observing, ‘people don’t want to remember it. It's part of an uncomfortable past that we are still reluctant to confront’. 54 Yet it was the provocative nature of the project that appealed to him. With plans already underway to construct new office buildings for representatives of the state governments in this area, Kernd’l stressed the moral impact on German politicians: ‘it would remind them every day of how evil governments can become’. 55 The Green Party would later agree on the value of incorporating Nazi-era bunkers into the design of the new buildings as Germany's metaphorical ‘thorn in the flesh’, arguing that ‘National Socialism cannot simply be hauled off to the construction materials dump’. 56 Kernd’l also hit back at claims that the site would become a shrine on the ‘purely technical’ basis that ‘not more than a hundred people could enter the rooms per day’. 57 A public meeting in February 1992 brought together historians, archaeologists and private citizens to debate the matter further. Architectural historian Angela Schoenberger supported Kernd’l's ideas, arguing, ‘this piece of land has immense historical meaning. This is where World War II was planned and we need to be very careful and serious when we plan its future use’. 58 An unnamed spectator, however, retorted, ‘this is a continuity of history that I don’t want. I’m all for honouring the victims of Nazism, but this plan sounds like a way of honouring the perpetrators’. 59 Nor was it only local Germans who felt uneasy over Kernd’l's museum plans. The New York Times published a letter from a reader in Massachusetts who disputed the historical significance of the site. ‘The bunker chambers’, he wrote, ‘do not speak to succeeding generations, as the Wannsee Haus does, or the former Army headquarters which contains the German Resistance Memorial Centre and the site of the summary execution of the July 20 1944 conspirators to eliminate Hitler’. To his mind, the bunker should, instead, ‘disappear forever under a revitalized capital city’. 60
Indeed, this issue as to whom the bunker ‘spoke’ rapidly coloured public dialogue. For figures such as Lea Rosh and Harald Szeemann, then working on the proposals for Berlin's central Holocaust memorial, the site offered a powerful message about the defeat of evil. Television talkshow host Rosh stated, ‘placing a memorial to the murdered Jews on the rubble of what was the centre of Nazi power means elevating the murder victims above their murderers, the victims above the perpetrators’. 61 Instructions issued for the first round of the memorial design competition stated explicitly, ‘buried deep in the earth were bunkers in which the perpetrators hid in the final hour before the destruction they had wreaked on others struck back at them and in which Hitler's mania ended in suicide. Reference should be made to this combination of hubris, destruction and self-destruction’. 62 Not everyone was convinced. Members of the Active Museum of Fascism and Resistance in Berlin, an activist group that had already initiated a symbolic dig on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, opposed the move, arguing that linking the Holocaust memorial to the bunker would seem to place responsibility for the genocide on Hitler alone, thereby absolving others of their guilt. The aforementioned Kernd’l, meanwhile, bitterly opposed plans to build an ‘artificial memorial’ in the area ‘as if nothing was [already] there’. 63 He continued to insist that the ‘authentic ruins’ of the bunkers would be the more attractive visitor attraction.
In 1999, a further, accidental unearthing of a ‘massive concrete chunk’ from the Führerbunker by roadworkers prompted historian Daniel J. Goldhagen to call for the site to be given UNESCO protection. This, he claimed, was not a German concern or even a European one, but a matter of ‘global’ significance due to Hitler's ‘world destructiveness’. To Goldhagen's mind, the site had the power to ‘teach us what to be afraid of, what to remember, and would serve to make us all learn from it’. 64 In an editorial penned for The Times, Goldhagen insisted that even the possible arrival of neo-Nazis upon the scene could prove a significant, educational moment, encouraging people to fight harder than ever to combat political extremism. ‘In secure democracies’, he intoned, ‘one does not eradicate symbols of hatred. One rises in solidarity with those who are hated against those who hate’. 65
It took two key events at the start of the millennium, though, to transform the Führerbunker from an unmarked patch of land to a labelled site of interest. The 2004 release of Downfall, the Oscar-nominated film depicting the final days of the Third Reich increased visitor footfall and galvanized numerous ‘internet sleuths’ into triangulating maps with historic and contemporary photographs to pinpoint the bunker's precise location. 66 Germany's hosting of the 2006 FIFA World Cup then helped to generate further public discussion around the (re)use of Nazi heritage thanks to the scheduling of matches in Nuremberg and the Berlin Olympic Stadium. Accordingly, the time finally seemed right to demarcate the bunker with an information board. 67 This signage, unveiled on 8 June 2006, offered a plan of the bunker complex and a concise summary of its wartime history in German and English. It was produced by the Berlin Underworlds Association, a not-for-profit organization specializing in documenting the city's subterranean history, from the development of gas, electricity and sewage infrastructure, to the construction of underground transport networks and air raid shelters. Membership of the Association comprises academics and students, regional planners and general history enthusiasts and while its work generally focuses upon guided tours of its dedicated museum at Gesundbrunnen subway station, it has erected fourteen information boards or commemorative plaques around the city highlighting locations such as the ruins of the Kroll Opera House where the Nazis passed the Enabling Act in 1933, and various attempted escape tunnels out of the GDR. Much of this, the Association notes, was done ‘on our own initiative’, and the very first of these above-ground installations was, in fact, the marking of the Führerbunker. 68 In a recent conversation with the author, one of the Association's guides recalled how this action stemmed from seeing ‘self-proclaimed city guides … organising highly strange tours there, which were not only based on bad taste but also partly on right-wing sentiments’. The Association thus aimed to ‘remove this “open wound” in the city's history … and to provide facts about what really happened at this location’. 69 Likewise, the Head of the Association, Dietmar Arnold told the press that this move was a form of historical clarification, declaring ‘it was time to clear up some of the myths and legends’. The accompanying press coverage, which was largely positive, repeatedly asserted that one in four visitors to Berlin had reported feeling ‘curious’ about the bunker but had, hitherto, received no formal help in locating it. Now, however, the past was being made ‘safe’ for tourists – and the belated marker was greeted warmly by Rochus Misch, a former member of Hitler's bodyguard who attended the unveiling. ‘At last’, he proclaimed, ‘people can see the place where the Third Reich came to an end’. 70
Today, the site of the former Führerbunker is relatively easy to find, thanks to the information board and directions on Google maps. While the old street names of Wilhelmstrasse and Vosstrasse persist, one of the roads now running parallel to the bunker site is Gertrud-Kolmar-Strasse – named for the German-Jewish poet murdered in Auschwitz. The area, then, sits at a fascinating intersection in terms of both remembrance and tourist activity: the area to the north includes the new government district and the Reichstag, as well as the Holocaust memorial. The German Finance Ministry, housed within Goering's former Aviation Ministry building sits to the south, as does the site of the former SS and Gestapo Headquarters that now holds the Topography of Terror Museum. This, together with the presence of a 200-m stretch of Berlin Wall outside Topography of Terror helps explain how the former Führerbunker has become an easy stop on the contemporary tourist trail; all sites are within comfortable walking distance for anyone looking to explore traces of dictatorship in the German capital.
The advent of social media and user-generated content websites has created new opportunities to observe tourist behaviour around the bunker site. The first Tripadvisor review of the Führerbunker appeared in June 2011. By the end of September 2021, the collection of comments had risen to 476, with the site rated 475th out of 1117 ‘things to do in Berlin’. To contextualize these numbers, the highest rated city attractions include the Reichstag, the Memorial of the Berlin Wall, and Museum Island. In the area adjacent to the Führerbunker, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Topography of Terror documentation centre have attracted 36,456 and 19,187 reviews respectively. 71 While statistics alone imply the relative insignificance of the Führerbunker, it is worth remembering that, unlike the aforementioned sites, it offers little in the way of direct visitor engagement. Perhaps a more pertinent comparison is Bebelplatz, the scene of the Nazi book burnings in 1933, which equates to another ‘empty’ space in the urban landscape. This holds a similar number of reviews (504), but a higher overall rating of four stars, equating to ‘very good’ on Tripadvisor. Bebelplatz encourages greater visitor interaction as its subterranean memorial of bare library shelves prompts people to peer down into the ‘void’ left by this act of cultural devastation. By contrast, the Führerbunker is now, as tourists repeatedly stress, ‘just a car park’. Coded by Tripadvisor under the labels ‘historic sites’ and ‘points of interest and landmarks’, the Führerbunker has an average, three-star rating – a result that reflects its ability to polarize public opinion. The vast majority of its reviews emanate from UK tourists, with Italians, Americans and Brazilians making up the remainder of the top four visitor nationalities. To explore this data further, visitor comments (in all languages) were collated and analysed for insight into tourist intentions, expectations and reactions.
Tripadvisor commentators essentially form two groups: those who present themselves as unwitting visitors, only ‘stumbling’ on the site thanks to tour guides or the spot's proximity to other points of interest; and those who purposely set out to see ‘where Hitler met his demise’, influenced by tourist literature, films and prior historical knowledge. In his broader study of Nazi heritage, Colin Philpott posits that there is an innate human desire to ‘tread where history was made’, and the Führerbunker posts certainly bear this out.
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One visitor exclaimed: I was standing right at the spot where Hitler's bunker was below the ground and where he shot himself to death! It sent a shiver down my spine just to think about all the history at this very place below my feet.
73
Indeed, however they reached it, many tourists conjured up emotional and sensory descriptions of their encounters with the site, frequently reporting a ‘strange feeling’, a ‘spine-tingling experience’ and ‘goosebumps’; or describing the atmosphere as ‘creepy’, ‘haunting’, ‘spooky’, ‘eerie’ and ‘awkward’. ‘You can feel the evil here’, declared one person. 74 Yet there is a tension between the site's historical significance and its bathetic surroundings. The emotive vocabulary is juxtaposed with labels such as ‘ordinary’, ‘low key’, ‘nondescript’ and ‘nothing special’. The word ‘disappointing’ appears frequently, alongside negative descriptors such as ‘uninspiring’, ‘underwhelming’, ‘grubby’ and ‘sad’. One person labelled it, succinctly, as a ‘non-attraction’. 75 Across the forum, there are constant interjections that this is ‘just a car park’ and that there is ‘only a sign’ to indicate the bunker's presence, a pattern reinforced through uploaded photographs that typically provide a close-up of either the information board or bare soil to denote the Hitler's absence. 76 While these ‘disappointments’ betray a lack of awareness about the site's postwar history, they also prompt an unexpected encounter with the challenges of difficult heritage as commentators try to make sense of the scene.
Many posts are tinged with regret, accusing the German government of being ‘scared’, or simply trying to have the past ‘rewritten or brushed aside’. Such reviewers stress the public hunger for historical information, the potential education value of the site, and the lost opportunities for tourist revenue. One reviewer argued: Such a shame to have a boring, nothing-to-see car park. It could be such a money spinner tourist attraction for historians from outside like me. The most famous WW2 site of all time such a gem going to waste. I know Hitler was evil, but you can’t delete history, it is what it is. And we could learn a lot from seeing it as it was and not burying the reality.
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Unsolicited solutions to the situation ranged from the provision of ‘more historical facts’, a more prominent marker, and the installation of a tourist office, museum or exhibition hall, through to the public exposure of at least a section of bunker. Certainly, it appears tourists had expected to see, touch or immerse themselves in something more tangible, phrases such as ‘shame’, ‘incomprehensible’, ‘absurd’ and ‘lost opportunity’ clouded their reviews.
Around 20 per cent of the Tripadvisor reviewers, however, came to recognize the purpose behind the lack of memorialization at the Führerbunker site, with recurrent phrases such as ‘deliberately anonymous’, ‘deliberately forgotten’, ‘deliberately bare’ and ‘deliberately uninspiring’. Moreover, there is evidence that these reviewers accepted this, inserting value judgments such as ‘thankfully destroyed’, ‘a wise decision’, ‘a fantastic idea’ and ‘glad it is hidden’ alongside explicit statements of approval. The words ‘rightly’ and ‘fitting’ were common alongside an awareness that the bunker's very absence constituted an important statement about the defeat of Nazism. As one tourist observed, ‘its ordinariness, given its terrible past, is compelling. It is not a shrine, it is not ghoulish but this is a beacon of hope that, no matter what, good will ultimately conquer evil’. 78 The most cheerful responses, meanwhile, emanated from those who recognized a certain irony in the scene. One person exclaimed, ‘What better tribute than a dilapidated, minor parking lot for his demise…. This isn’t very impressive, but that's really the point’. 79 Others relished the opportunity for mischievous acts of petty vengeance on spot where Hitler died: to spit, smirk or ‘trample’ him underfoot. As reviewers learned (usually from tour guides) of the reasons behind the ‘dereliction’ of the site, there was evidence of critical reflection. One reviewer described these thought processes: ‘at first you think well surely you should make something more of this. Then you think why glorify one of the vilest people in history or give idiots a place to pay homage to him. In a way it's a fitting tribute and something that would and should be seen as a final slap in the face to him’. 80
In the decades since the end of the Second World War, Hitler's bunker has been blown up, buried under rubble, grassed over, fenced off and ultimately reduced to an innocuous car park. It has experienced a somewhat cyclical history, passing through repeated attempts to destroy, as well as recurring moments of intense tourist interest and efforts to ‘discover’ or ‘expose’ it. The site has held multiple meanings, whether presented as an icon of Allied triumph in 1945, recalled as a symbol of Nazi hubris or heralded for its educational value, offering moral instruction for overcoming hatred. One constant feature, though, has been concern for the site's power as a place for mourning Hitler himself and becoming a beacon for neo-Nazi groups.
This concern, previously expressed by Allied occupiers or city politicians, has now filtered down to ‘ordinary’ commentators. Contemporary Tripadvisor users are divided between those who come to recognize the potential danger of a Hitler shrine and thus accept the humble, outward appearance of the Führerbunker site; and those who insist that the threat from political extremists has now receded. Those branding the site ‘disappointing’ were more inclined to suggest that enough time has now passed to affect a ‘safe’ excavation and expose at least some section of the site to visitors. Similar calls have been taken up by Italian writer and lobbyist Pietro Guido whose pressure group, ‘Save History’, has been calling repeatedly upon UNESCO and the Mayor of Berlin to unearth the bunker and transform it into a visible memorial to the Germany's ‘dark past’. Guido not only remains hopeful that the political climate will one day allow this, but also suggests the city authorities implicitly sympathize with his preservation campaign and share his conviction that the site deserves greater ‘historical respect’ by dint of the fundamental fact they have not yet allowed anything else to be built upon it. 81 It is an argument, though, that ignores the other difficult heritage associated with this part of the city. Already, re-vegetation and urban regeneration have supplanted the ‘Cold War rawness of the site’; by not building directly on this part of the former Death Strip, the city thus helps to recall the former borderland as well as the older Nazi legacy. 82
Debates as to whether it is now ‘safe’ to speak openly about the bunker gained further momentum in 2016 with the opening of the nearby Berlin Story exhibition on the rise of Nazism, replete with both a scale model of Hitler's underground headquarters and a full-size replica of the study where he killed himself. Housed in a bunker on the site of the former Anhalter Station, the museum gives visitors a more tangible indicator of what the Führerbunker looked like but has, inevitably, courted controversy. Die Welt, for instance, branded it ‘tasteless’. 83 In response, the curators argue that the reconstruction of Hitler's study was conceived as a means to shatter any prevailing myths about Hitler's final hideout being a grand palace, telling Der Tagesspiegel, ‘We wanted to show clearly how miserably the dictator ended. That he couldn’t even leave the room without pushing the chair away from the door’. 84 These sites now operate in tandem with one another: advertisements for the museum hang from the lampposts around the original Führerbunker location, while, in turn, visitors often head off, to retrace the spot where Hitler died after viewing the exhibition. In the process, the bunker site is effectively ‘normalized’ as a legitimate tourist attraction. Indeed, as one perceptive Tripadvisor commentator posited, the solitary information board is becoming a ‘kind of weird shrine’ in itself, a backdrop for numerous visitors to pose for photographs. 85
Claims that the Führerbunker is no longer ‘difficult’ may be premature. Examples from other locations associated with Nazi perpetrators show, all too clearly, that the threat from the Far Right has not disappeared. In 2011, for instance, the grave of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess was exhumed after it had become the focal point for annual neo-Nazi rallies, while the town of Bückeberg, scene of the annual Nazi harvest festival throughout the 1930s, has long seen flowers left upon the ruins of the former honorary tribune on the anniversary of Hitler's birth. 86 The notion that similar activities could extend to the Führerbunker site is borne out by an isolated, yet striking comment left on Tripadvisor in 2015. Visitor JP argued emphatically that the spot where Hitler and Goebbels died ‘deserved greater care and consideration’. Indicating an apparent desire to pay his respects to the deceased, he declared, ‘I visited the bunker on April 30 2015, the day that marked Hitler's 70th anniversary, and there was no mention of it there. I thought about depositing flowers on the spot, and even that was not possible because there was no container to place them.’ 87
Ultimately, the example of Hitler's bunker demonstrates that heritage does not have to be visible to prove ‘difficult’; nor can a problematic past be neatly buried. The concrete remnants of the Führerbunker and other sections of Nazi underground defences have literally broken through to the surface on several occasions (1987–88, 1990, 1999), while the lack of signage prior to 2006 hardly prevented the most curious and intrepid tourists from searching for clues as to its whereabouts. The memory of what once existed and the historical events played out in this space remains strong and whereas previous tourist activity was almost clandestine (sneaking a peek over the Berlin Wall, or poring for hours over historic references to pinpoint its location), today it is commonplace. Digital maps and social media have increased public awareness of the site while rephotography has enabled audiences to visualize the bunker space more accurately within the contemporary urban landscape.
The subsequent contrast between heightened public knowledge of the whereabouts of the Führerbunker, and the bathetic scene in which it sits, provides useful instruction for navigating problematic heritage. The site, effectively, becomes a countermemorial: a place that ‘unsettles’ visitors and provokes discussion. 88 As the scene defies expectations, it challenges tourists to reflect on what they had hoped to see, and why; its nondescript appearance motives visitors to ask questions, to consider alternative ways of handling the site, and to slowly think through the challenges involved. In her study of the former NSDAP rally grounds in Nuremberg, Sharon MacDonald points to the ‘double encoding’ of difficult heritage: the meanings ‘written into’ the site, and the ‘preferred readings’ provided by present-day tour guides. The guides, she observes, deploy ‘façade-peeling stories’ to puncture the pomposity of Nazi architecture and remind visitors of the regime's atrocities. Connections, for instance, are made between the parade grounds and the use of slave labour in quarrying building materials. 89 Similar ‘complex visualization work’ is required at the Führerbunker. Visitors must imagine not only the bunker's geographical footprint, and cramped internal conditions, but also the final cremation of Hitler's remains amid Soviet shelling, the wartime rubble, and the subsequent impact of occupation and division. The bunker demands a ‘temporal mediation’ between past and present landscapes while its proximity to both the former SS and Gestapo headquarters and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe encourages visitors to reflect upon Nazi terror and the devastating implications of policymaking conducted in the former Reich Chancellery. 90 Accordingly, the current presentation of the Führerbunker, marked solely by a simple information board, seems fitting. It prevents endless speculation while simultaneously making visitors stop and think about what they are (not) seeing. In the words of one Tripadvisor user, ‘this is an acceptable compromise: commemorate the past without glorifying or over dramatizing it’. 91
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Nick Carter, Clare Copley, Tim Grady, Sebastian Gehrig, Alix Green and Richard Bodek for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
