Führerbunker

An air-raid shelter beneath the old Reich Chancellery garden in Berlin was built in two stages: the upper Vorbunker, completed in 1936 as a reception-hall cellar, and the lower Führerbunker, built by the Hochtief company and completed in 1944. The Führerbunker lay around 8.5 metres underground, 2.5 metres deeper than the Vorbunker and connected to it by a stairway that could be sealed with a bulkhead and steel door. Its roof was almost 3 metres of concrete, with 30 rooms shielded by about 4 metres more; construction cost just over 1.3 million Reichsmarks. Below the water table, it was damp and needed constant pumping, and ran on a diesel generator and well water, with a telex, switchboard and radio for communications.

Adolf Hitler moved into the Führerbunker on 16 January 1945, and it became the centre of the Nazi regime for the rest of the war in Europe. Senior staff, including Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels, joined him there in April, and Eva Braun was also with him in the bunker. Goebbels' wife Magda and their six children took rooms in the Vorbunker, and two or three dozen support staff, including secretary Traudl Junge and bodyguard Rochus Misch, also sheltered there. Hitler made his last trip to the surface on 20 April, his 56th birthday, to award the Iron Cross to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth; that afternoon Berlin was shelled by Soviet artillery for the first time. By 22 April, told that the relief attack he had ordered had not moved, Hitler declared for the first time that the war was lost, blamed his generals, and said he would stay in Berlin and shoot himself.

On 28 April Hitler learned that Heinrich Himmler was seeking surrender terms with the Western Allies and treated it as treason; Himmler's Berlin representative Hermann Fegelein was shot after a court martial for desertion, and Hitler ordered Himmler's own arrest. After midnight, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in the bunker, then dictated his political and private testament to secretary Traudl Junge, witnessed at around 04:00.

Hitler shot himself at around 15:30 on 30 April; Eva Braun took cyanide beside him. Following his instructions, their bodies were carried into the Chancellery garden, doused in petrol and burned. Joseph Goebbels succeeded Hitler as Chancellor under the will's terms. Early on 1 May, General Hans Krebs tried and failed to negotiate anything short of unconditional surrender with the Red Army. Later that day, the six Goebbels children were killed with poison in the Vorbunker — English-language accounts crediting their father, German ones probably their mother Magda — and Joseph and Magda Goebbels themselves died at the bunker's emergency exit that evening, accounts differing on whether by gunshot or cyanide. Generals Krebs and Burgdorf died in the bunker's map room overnight, by gunshot or poison depending on the account; Soviet forces took the complex on 2 May, and the Goebbels children's bodies, marked by cyanide, were found on 3 May.

The Red Army levelled the ruined Reich Chancellery buildings above ground between 1945 and 1949 as part of an effort to erase Nazi landmarks, and Soviet investigators studied blood traces in the bunker in 1946 while probing Hitler's death. In December 1947 Soviet forces tried to blow up the bunker itself; only its internal dividing walls were damaged. East German authorities made a further demolition attempt in 1959, after which the ruins were covered with an earth mound. Standing close to the Berlin Wall, the site was left undeveloped until 1988–89, when housing construction removed the bunker's reinforced concrete ceiling and about half its outer walls; other uncovered sections of the old Chancellery complex were simply filled in or resealed.

For decades no marker identified the site — surrounding buildings were built to keep the area anonymous — and the bunker's former emergency exit became a car park. On 8 June 2006, ahead of that year's FIFA World Cup, a single information board with a schematic diagram of the bunker was installed near Potsdamer Platz; it was designed to present a plain historical record rather than a memorial, and Rochus Misch, one of the last surviving 1945 occupants, attended its unveiling. In 2025, blood recovered from the sofa in Hitler's study was analysed by a University of Bath researcher and confirmed as his through comparison with a living relative's DNA. Parts of the bunker complex still survive underground, sealed off from public access.