Bunker beneath Hitler's Chancellery Sparks Building Dispute
Several bunkers lay beneath Hitler's chancellery, but can the city keep them straight? Plans for flats and offices may depend on which underground Nazi building is which.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Christoph Neubauer Verlag,CC BY-SA 4.0
The New Reich Chancellery, completed in January 1939, was one of Hitler's pet projects: a building designed to intimidate guests. Upon entry, visitors passed through a sequence of rooms that included a marble gallery twice the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles – the hope being that dignitaries would be suitably overawed by the time they reached Hitler.
Grandeur on that scale required large structures underground too. While the building itself was demolished after the war, parts of the bunker complex beneath it survive – and they are still causing headaches for modern-day developers.
HEIST is a worker-owned online magazine, founded by writers and editors who after years working across Berlin's media landscape believed something essential was missing.
Anyone living here has felt a growing gap between the city as it actually is and the version being served up by mainstream outlets. We experienced that disconnect firsthand. We saw political censorship shape coverage decisions and felt the weight of billionaire ownership land directly on our work. It reached a point where we could either keep going along with it, or try to build something better.
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