Almost warningly, Old Fritz looks out of his oval picture frame into the room, which is barely twelve square meters. Underneath is a small desk with a telephone, opposite a sofa, a chair with a blanket on it, and a coffee table with a teapot and a pair of glasses that have been left behind; On the wall, a large gas bottle catches the eye. Here, on April 30, 1945, at around 3:30 p.m., Adolf Hitler evaded the earthly judge by committing suicide.
The room has not existed since December 11, 1947; At that time, Soviet engineers detonated tons of captured ammunition here. They wanted to destroy the Führer bunker in Berlin-Mitte and failed because of reinforced concrete up to four meters thick; only the inner walls, which were only 50 centimeters thick, were torn away.
The bunker has already been reconstructed several times: for the feature films “The Last Act” (1955), “The Last Ten Days” (1972) and “Der Untergang” (2004), digitally by Christoph Neubauer (2010) and physically in 2016 by Wieland Giebel in the Berlin exhibition “Hitler – How could it happen?”. At the end of October 2022, the company Nord XR from Hanover published a new virtual reality reconstruction of the entire bunker system.
The progress in computer technology has meant that today photo-realistic views can be calculated in real time – once you have purchased the program, you “walk” through practically the entire Führerbunker, i.e. almost all of its rooms, with suitable virtual reality glasses. It’s an absolutely amazing feeling – especially because all that remains of the building today is the floor slab and rising walls up to a height of 1.60 to 1.80 meters; they are under a parking lot opposite the Holocaust memorial in Berlin soil.
Martin Schwiezer, the head of Nord XR, knows that his project – which is supported by the Lower Saxony-Bremen funding agency Nordmedia – could trigger fundamental criticism. “The events in the so-called Führerbunker in particular offer a spatial and temporal concentrate of the madness that was so characteristic of the Third Reich,” says the IT entrepreneur: “That’s why responsible education is so important to us.”
This includes the fact that, in addition to the exact reconstructions of the rooms and their furnishings, key scenes from the last days of the Hitler regime in the bunker are also recreated in the VR animation – but with people deliberately alienated to white schemes, so that no “Hitler” photo-realistically through image is running. Schwiezer isn’t worried about applause from the wrong side: “The residents of the Reich Chancellery’s air-raid shelter killed their pets, their children and finally themselves. Anyone who thinks there is something about it that deserves applause has completely different problems.”
Although the events in the Führerbunker have been well researched since Joachim Fest’s book “Der Untergang”, the template for the film of the same name, and the memoirs “Until the last hour” by Traudl Junge, the last Hitler secretary who was still alive at the time (both from 2002), remains the dark fascination. Several groups of tourists still visit the place between Wilhelmstraße and In den Ministergärten every day, where they find serious information on a board. The speculation that has been widespread since the early 1950s about the area that was inaccessible for a long time in the GDR death strip, for example about allegedly several bunker floors or about tunnel connections to Tempelhof Airport, therefore hardly stand a chance today.
The Führerbunker prolonged Hitler’s existence and with it his destructive war. The eastern part had already been built in 1935/36 under strict secrecy; In 1943/44 the much stronger western component was added. Hitler stayed here since his return to Berlin on January 16, 1945, during the almost daily air raids; At the end of February or beginning of March, he moved into the small “apartment” in the main bunker, which consisted of three rooms measuring around twelve square meters each and a toilet – how cramped compared to his office in the New Reich Chancellery a few meters to the south, which was ten times the size.
The Second World War had long since been lost for the Third Reich, but Hitler wanted to continue the work of destruction to the last. The main bunker with the then indestructible, four meter thick reinforced concrete ceiling gave him the opportunity. Nord XR’s digital reconstruction allows the scene of the sinking to be viewed more realistically than ever before.
Until the night of April 29/30, Hitler directed the dwindling forces of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS out of his always somewhat damp cave. By then the Red Army soldiers had already reached positions that were only 100 meters away from the bunker. Only then did Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide.
The corpses were set on fire in a shell crater in front of the bunker’s garden exit, but were not burned due to a lack of petrol. About 24 hours later, Magda Goebbels poisoned her six teenage children, who had come to the bunker with her, and then chose suicide with her husband Joseph. Some of the remaining entourage of the dead dictator also took their own lives, including the last chief of staff, Hans Krebs, and the last Wehrmacht chief adjutant, Wilhelm Burgdorf, who probably got drunk beforehand.
Others, such as the secretaries Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian, the liaison to the Foreign Office, Walter Hewel, the SS servants Heinz Linge and Otto Günsche, and of course Martin Bormann, as Hitler’s secretary from 1941 and in fact the head of the NSDAP apparatus, tried to flee. The two women succeeded; the two SS men were taken prisoner of war by the Soviets, where they remained until 1955; Bormann and Hewel both committed suicide while being surrounded.
Transparency note: WELT history editor Sven Felix Kellerhoff has published several books on the Führerbunker and advised Nord XR on historical issues. He was not involved in the implementation of the reconstruction.
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