Inside the Führerbunker: History, Architecture, and Legacy

The Führerbunker is perhaps the best-known of the now-lost symbolic sites of Hitler's regime. An air raid shelter located near and under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, it bore witness to the last months of Hitler's life, his descent into despair and his death by his own hand. Parts of it technically still remain, filled in, buried and built over, with an information board placed by the car park that covers what used to be one of its entrances; but the disappearance of the bunker is representative of the German people's desire to put the past behind.

What was the Führerbunker?

The word literally means "Leader's bunker," and that's exactly what it was: an underground bunker for Adolf Hitler to keep him safe from Allied bombings and artillery strikes in the last months of World War II. Besides being a safe residence for the Führer and his staff, it also doubled as the last of the Führerhauptquartiere ("Führer Headquarters"), a series of over a dozen facilities, some of which Hitler ended up never using. The two most famous of his other headquarters were the Berghof, his private residence in Obersalzberg, and the Wolfsschanze ("Wolf's Lair") in Poland, where he was almost assassinated by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg as part of Operation Valkyrie (Valkyrie). As a Führer's Headquarter, the bunker was where Hitler regularly held conferences with his generals to discuss the progress of the war.

Where was the Führerbunker?

The first air raid shelter built on the site, not yet called Führerbunker, was at Wilhelmstraße 77 in Berlin.  Located in central Berlin near the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz and, during the Cold War, Checkpoint Charlie, Wilhelmstraße housed numerous German government buildings. The most important of these was the Reich Chancellery, the office of the Chancellor of Germany.

After becoming Chancellor in 1933 (Becoming Führer), Hitler decided that the so-called "Old Reich Chancellery" was too small for him, and ordered an expansion, followed by the construction of a brand-new "New Reich Chancellery" by his favorite architect, Albert Speer, in 1938. The resulting new block of buildings included a large garden between the two chancelleries, with the bunker built partially under the garden.

Origins of Hitler’s Bunker

The bunker's inception began during the aforementioned 1933 expansion of the Old Chancellery. A large reception hall, that could double as a ballroom, was added to the building; the blueprints also showed a large cellar underneath that led a further 4 ft 11 in (1.5 m) down to an air raid shelter. This structure, finished in 1936, was later named the Vorbunker ("forward" or "upper bunker"). The second, deeper part of the underground complex was added later as part of an extensive subterranean construction program in Berlin. This deeper part, finished in 1944, is the Führerbunker proper. (On an interesting note, the company that built the bunker, Hochtief, earned itself worldwide acclaim in the 1960s by disassembling and reassembling the ancient Egyptian temple complex of Abu Simbel, saving it from being flooded by the construction of a new dam.)

Construction

The Vorbunker was located 4 ft 11 in (1. 5m) beneath the cellar of the Old Chancellery's reception hall, and had a concrete roof 5 ft 3 in (1.6 m) thick. It had two entrances arriving to the same hall, one from the New Chancellery (from where one could easily reach the Foreign Ministry and the Propaganda Ministry), and one from the garden of the Foreign Ministry. This hall was separated from the rest of the bunker by a hermetically sealable gas door to protect the occupants from chemical weapons.

Once past the door, a hallway led westward (parts of it were probably used as dining and conference areas, with small rooms and room complexes opening to the left and right: a room for air filters, one for water supplies and showers, quarters for personnel, guards and guests, a kitchen and wine store, and several ropes that were used by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels's family. At the end of the hallway, two short flights of steps led to a lower hall, from which Hitler's own Führerbunker could be reached.

Located deeper than the Vorbunker, the Führerbunker was about 28 ft (8.5 m) below the Chancellery's garden. The approximately 17 small rooms of the bunker were protected by 13 ft 1 in (4 m) of concrete from bomb and artillery strikes, and the room complex was surrounded by 7 ft 3 in (2.2 m) walls (though the internal walls separating the rooms were much thinner. The complex included a lounge, a generator and ventilation plant, an electricity switch room and toilets. Hitler's long-time partner and eventual wife Eva Braun had two rooms to herself: a living room and a bathroom. Hitler himself had a three-room private quarter: an office, a sitting room and a bedroom. Goebbels and Hitler's doctor had their own bedrooms but shared a single office. A conference room and an adjacent map room were the locations for Hitler's meetings with his military staff.

The conference room, the westmost room in the complex, also had an emergency exit leading to the Chancellery garden, where Hitler's dog, a German shepherd named Blondi, had her walks either with her master or a handler. 

The Bunker's Occupants

We don't know if the Vorbunker had seen any use before January 1945, but Hitler descended into the bunker complex on January 16 to be safe from nighttime bomber raids over Berlin. For a few weeks, he still spent the daytime above ground in the Chancellery, but eventually began staying in the bunker all the time, only leaving briefly to walk his dog in the Chancellery garden past the emergency exit.

He was accompanied into the bunker by his senior staff, including Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Hitler's private secretary; Joseph Goebbels with his wife Magda and their six children; and Hitler's longtime partner, Eva Braun. Beside guards, there were also two or three dozen support, medical and administrative staff present, including Hitler's secretaries (including Traudl Junge, who typed Hitler's will and was later an important source of information on life in the bunker); Hitler's doctor, Ludwig Stumpfegger; and Sergeant Rochus Misch, a bodyguard and telephone operator who was the last German to flee the bunker.

Life Inside the Führerbunker

The bunker was not designed to accommodate this many people (as well as the high-ranking officers who came for Hitler's conferences); at a mere 3,000 square feet in area, the Führerbunker was unbearably cramped. The Berlin water table is high and was constantly threatening to flood the bunker, forcing the inhabitants to use the pump system 24 hours a day and still have to put with a cold dampness. The pumps, along with the air ventilation system, caused constant noise that added to the irritation of the people inside.

The bunker was made slightly more comfortable with the addition of high-quality furniture and oil paintings brought down from the Old Chancellery. The most prized of the paintings was a small portrait hung above Hitler's writing desk in his office, depicting the Führer's idol, 18th-century Prussian King Frederick the Great. Despite the niceties, however, visitors to the bunker later still described it as a "fetid hole in the ground" and a "concrete coffin."

In the late spring, when the fall of the Nazi regime was clear to all, many inhabitants took to smoking or drinking heavily to cope with the tension and despair. The Führerbunker was a no-smoking area, so people could only enjoy a cigarette in the Vorbunker, or, if they were particularly brave, outside by the entrance. Frequent Soviet artillery shelling over the last few days forced the guards to dive inside and shut the door regularly.

Artillery damage to the Chancellery building above was severe once the Red Army began attacking Berlin. Generals visiting Hitler first had to weave their way through the building, going around the long way to avoid collapsed corridors, even before they reached the bunker itself.

Death in the Bunker

The Red Army started the Battle of Berlin on April 16, 1945, exactly three months after Hitler occupied his final home. Hitler went outside for the last time on April 20, his 56th birthday, when he awarded the Iron Cross to several Hitler Youth child soldiers. This was, coincidentally, the first time Soviet artillery bombarded Berlin.

At this point, Hitler was still in denial and hoped that German maneuvers would save Berlin – not realizing that the remaining German forces in the area where nowhere near enough to mount any sort of meaningful counterattack. He finally accepted the hopelessness of his situation at a conference on April 22, when he flew into a tearful rage, blamed his generals for losing the war, and announced that he would stay in the city and shoot himself.

On April 27, Berlin's communications were cut off from the rest of the country, and secure radio contact with fighting troops was lost. The next day, the BBC reported on the radio that Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, was negotiating a surrender to the western Allies. Once informed, Hitler decided this was treason: he ordered Himmler's arrest, and had Himmler's Berlin representative, Hermann Fegelein (who was Eva Braun's brother-in-law) court-martialed and shot. By the evening, Soviet troops were at Potsdamer Platz, a square a single block away from the bunker.

Shortly after midnight on April 29, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small ceremony in the map room. He then hosted a modest wedding breakfast in the early hours of the morning. Either before or after the wedding (sources disagree), he took his secretary Traudl Junge to another room to dictate his last will and testament. He also left instructions to appoint Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and Joseph Goebbels as head of state and chancellor, respectively, after his death.

Later in the day, Hitler learned that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was executed by Italian partisans, and his body was displayed in humiliation in the Italian city of Milan. (The Last Days of a Dictator) Afraid of the same fate, his decision to commit suicide became all the more resolute. He received some cyanide capsules from his doctor, Stumpfegger, but Stumpfegger was an SS-man, and Hitler, his paranoia fanned to even higher flames after Himmler's betrayal, was no longer sure he could trust the poison to work. He had one of the ampules tested on his dog Blondi, who died instantly, convincing Hitler of the poison's efficacy and prompting several other bunker inhabitants to ask for some. According to eyewitness accounts, several other dogs, including Blondi's pups and the pets of Eva Braun and several other inhabitants, were taken to the garden and shot the next day.

At around 2:30 p.m. on April 30, after saying goodbye to his staff, Adolf and Eva Hitler went into his study and closed the door. Sometime later, Hitler's valet vent into the antechamber and smelled gunpowder. He fetched Bormann, and the two men entered together, finding the bodies of the married couple and smelling almonds, a telltale sign of cyanide. Braun bit into a poison capsule, and Hitler shot himself in the head, possibly also biting into an ampoule at the same moment. The bodies were taken to the Chancellery garden and burned in a shell crater with the aid of some gasoline. Several witnesses testified to recognizing Hitler, as neither the top of his head, nor his lower legs and feet were covered by the blanket he was wrapped in.

In the late afternoon of the following day, May 1, Goebbels had his children given morphine injections to render them unconscious, then had cyanide pills placed in their mouths and crushed. There are minor discrepancies in the testimonies about the death of Joseph and Magda Goebbels, but the version told by his adjutant is this: after killing their children, they walked up to the garden, and the adjutant, staying in the stairwell, heard two shots. Coming out, he saw the bodies; acting on Goebbels’s previous instructions, he had a soldier fire a few shots into Joseph Goebbels's body to make sure he was dead, then both bodies were doused with gasoline and set alight, so they did not burn completely.

Those who still remained fled and tried to break out or escape. The last man to leave was telephone operator Rochus Misch. One man, electro-mechanic Johannes Hentschel, stayed behind to operate the machinery that also supplied a field hospital in the Reich Chancellery building with power and water. He surrendered to the Soviet troops that entered the bunker at 9 a.m. on May 2.

The Bunker After the War

On July 4, an American writer toured the bunker after bribing the Soviet guard with a pack of cigarettes. Many politicians, soldiers and diplomats visited the site in the coming weeks, including Winston Churchill on July 14.

The area became a part of the Soviet occupation zone, and later East Berlin, and the Communist authorities blocked access to the site. The Soviets gave the other Allies a brief chance to investigate the bunker grounds in December 1945, but the representatives could only visit for a single day to watch German workers dig up some items, including two hats that were identified as Hitler's; on their arrival the next day, an NKVD (Soviet secret police) guard accused them of removing documents from the Chancellery and barred further access.

The ruins of both the Old and New Chancellery were levelled by the Soviets in the years after the war. The bunker largely survived, but was partially flooded. It withstood an attempt to blow it up in 1947. The bunker site lay close to the Berlin Wall, so the site was left undeveloped for most of the Cold War. An extensive construction project for residential buildings unearthed several sections of the bunker in 1988-89; the Vorbunker was destroyed, and parts of the Führerbunker were filled in or resealed in order to erase these last Nazi landmark vestiges.

The Führerbunker Today
Leaving no visible trace of the Führerbunker was a deliberate choice by the East German authorities, which didn't want the location to turn into a Nazi, and later neo-Nazi shrine. There's little to see today, but some tours, including our Third Reich Tour, still visit the site; if you're going to talk about the bunker (and you should on a World War II tour), you might as well do it on the spot.

The emergency exit, near which both Hitler, Eva Braun and the Goebbels's were burned, is now occupied by a car park. An information board was installed at the site in 2006 with a brief history and schematics of the bunker. Both a large Holocaust memorial and a memorial dedicated to Georg Elser (The Carpenter Who Almost Killed Hitler) can be found near the bunker site today.

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