BERLIN — If it weren’t for the easily missed informational plaque, the site of Adolf Hitler’s demise could be mistaken for a normal parking lot.
Construction workers in 1999 accidentally dug up parts of the concrete bunker where Hitler died by suicide, reigniting a long-standing debate over how Germany should deal with Nazi relics.
Now, more than 25 years later, plans to build apartments over another Nazi hideout nearby are reanimating the conversation about how to preserve history without glorifying it.
The overgrown lot at the center of the controversy — a prime piece of real estate near Potsdamer Platz and the glitzy Mall of Berlin — was once the home of Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery, an administrative building erected in the late 1930s. A Hamburg-based developer has been approved to turn the property into apartments and office space, according to the German publication Bild. The developer, SMV Berlin, did not respond to a request for comment.
The chancellery’s aboveground buildings were destroyed after the war, but preservation advocates say the intact Nazi bunker — one of the last vestiges of Hitler’s center of power — ought to be protected.
Last year, Berlin’s State Monument Council in a memo expressed concerns about the developer’s demolition plans and called for relevant authorities to reconsider whether the site should have historical protections. The council said the chancellery was “the planning and starting point of World War II and also stands symbolically for the catastrophic end of the Nazi regime.”
But the construction project has the support of Christian Gaebler, Berlin’s senator for urban development, building and housing. In a city facing a housing shortage, Gaebler “has made it clear that he prioritizes residential construction at this location,” said Martin Pallgen, a spokesperson for the urban development department. There has long been a plan to develop the site, Pallgen said, and the bunker is not a protected monument.
A May analysis from the commercial real estate firm CBRE found that sharp increases in asking rents for new leases in Berlin were the result of “significant excess demand and the lack of available housing.” The city’s population has grown by more than half a million people since 2010, but residential construction has not kept up with the increasing demand.
Dietmar Arnold, chairman of Berliner Unterwelten, an organization that documents the city’s underground historical sites and makes them accessible to the public, said in a statement that he “is not opposed to the construction of apartments” but wants the bunker site to be preserved.
During World War II, the subterranean site served as a “mother-and-child bunker” and an emergency field hospital, Arnold said.
“The bunker can easily be built over, as the walls are [more than five feet] thick,” Arnold, who last toured the bunker in 2007, said in a statement. But, he added, “the site symbolises the catastrophic end of the Nazi regime. And that is why … an information and documentation centre on the downfall of the Nazi regime and the final days of the war in Berlin should be established right here, in this authentic and prominent location.”
Arnold said that his organization held “an exploratory meeting” with the site’s developers in June but that “nothing further has happened.”
Divisions over the future of the site are part of a decades-long debate centered on how the country should address its complex history with the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. While some have argued that preserving vestiges of the era could transform them into pilgrimage sites for neo-Nazis, the country also prides itself on its culture of remembrance and acknowledgment of uncomfortable historical truths.
In the case of the bunker where Hitler died, the city long resisted disclosing the location over fears that it would become a rallying point for Nazi sympathizers, and it wasn’t until 2006 that the informational plaque at the site was put up. Other prominent sites connected to Hitler and his top lieutenants have been destroyed.
Nikolaus Bernau, an art historian and architect, opposes the destruction of the chancellery’s bunker and the construction of apartments at the site.
Bernau said “it is definitely improper to build” over the site where countless atrocities were planned by the Nazis and said the land should serve as a site for people to “learn about the history of fascism and the history of power.”
“We have these few original parts of [Hitler’s chancellery and bunker complexes], and if these were the original parts of a medieval castle which stood there, then of course nobody would debate about destroying it,” Bernau said.
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