Row over plan to demolish Nazi bunker under Berlin

There are plans in Berlin to tear down one of the last remnants of Adolf Hitler’s power centre.

Almost nothing remains of the Nazi leader’s chancellery in central Berlin, except a bunker.

But now there are plans to demolish it to build flats and offices.

The New Reich Chancellery, built by Hitler’s favourite architect Albert Speer, was severely damaged at the end of World War Two and then torn down by order of the Soviet forces in 1949.

However the bunker is still visible in a patch of wasteland.

Berlin’s Housing Senator Christian Gaebler (SPD) believes it is time for the structure to go.

“We are not standing in the way of new housing developments just to preserve a bunker that might then even become a place of pilgrimage,” he told the BZ newspaper.

But others say the bunker should be preserved.

Dietmar Arnold, chairman of the Berlin Underworlds Association, told the BBC it would be “absolute madness” to demolish the bunker.

“It is a site of the perpetrators,” he said. “It was the power centre of Nazi Germany, Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery, and these are the last remains.”

He wants to work with the Holocaust Museum to turn the site into a museum and memorial site, with an exhibit about the end of the war.

“So much history has been destroyed here in Germany, both Communist history and Nazi history. We can’t keep doing that.”

Arnold last went into the bunker in 2007, when he said it was in very good condition.

He said this was not the more famous Führerbunker, where Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide and which lies about 120m to the north.

Instead this was used by people who worked in the Reich Chancellery. At the end of the war a hospital was set up inside the structure.

According to Arnold, 1,200 sq m (12,900 sq ft) of the bunker complex remain intact; the walls and ceiling are each 1.7m (5.6ft) thick.

He believes it would even be possible to build on top of them without demolishing the entire bunker.