The vast majority of Shisomen restaurant diners asks for his star dish: a delicious vegan ramen who would have delighted the most sadly famous inhabitant in the neighborhood, that radical vegetarian he had on this same LugaR su propia workshop: Adolf Hitler. The former Reich Foreign Ministry was in what is today a central urbanization but anodine of Berlin. The Nazi dictator committed suicide here, under a sand park where the Berliners take out their dogs to do their needs.
You have to travel in time until April 30, 1945 to visualize a Ruin Foreign Ministry, with the Russians assaulting the neighborhood the neighbor Reichstag And the last faithful to Hitler taking out his lifeless body enrolled in a blanket next to the Eva Braunalready turned into Eva Hitler since the previous day. Both had removed their lives about 8.5 meters below, in the two -storey bunker complex built in the gardens of the building a few years before.
The shelter, known as Driver bunkerhad solid walls and resources to resist weeks of isolation. The man who had set fire to Europe, a conqueror of almost the entire continent and intellectual author of some of the worst crimes in the history of humanity, burned in what is today the parking of the Gertrud-Kolmar-Strasse for hours, fed by the 180 liters of gasoline that his driver, Erich Kempka, got. Near him also burned the bodies of Joseph y Magda Goebbels And the remains of his Blondie dog -with which the efficacy of cyanide capsules was tested -, along with his four puppies, shot by the bunker guards.
The first Soviet soldiers to enter that underground Titanic were not hardened Frontovikithe first -line veterans who had put the flag on the Reichstag, but a group of military women. When they accessed the lower floors, they found some Nazi hierarchs sitting in armchairs with a shot in the head. Only the coach who was in charge of maintaining the generators lit, Johannes Hentschel was alive. When they saw him, they loved them with their weapons:
– Where is Hitler?
– He is dead. His body is burned out.
– ¿y Eva Braun?
– It is also dead.
– Where are your things?
The Soviet entered their room and the perfumes, the stockings, the dresses, the cosmetics, a gramophone with discs were taken … It was the first documented looting of the Führerbunker of the many who would come, mostly perpetrated by the soldiers of the Red Army themselves, wishing to take some souvenir War of the place where Hitler lived hidden his last days to die for the shot of a Walther PPK, James Bond’s favorite weapon. Many collaborators asked him for weeks to flee from Berlin before the thrust of the Soviet battleship columns, but I dreamed with an end wagneriano And he was terrified of ending as his friend Benito Mussolinihanged upside down of a gas station.
In that funeral pira pathetic in the garden, the criminal project of Nazism came out and inaugurated a new era that saw the birth of unthinkable alliances until that moment, such as that of French and Germans or that of Americans and Japanese, and that the world was divided into two, separated by an infamous wall and a steel curtain. World War II had started it in September 1939 Hitler and Stalin as Poland and Baltic countries were distributed. As if it were a nightmare difficult to forget, the Soviets wanted to erase every physical trace of that Nazi regime.
The remains of the Foreign Ministry were demolished in 1949 and the authorities of the East Germany the bunker with explosives several times, but their concrete was so solid that they failed to destroy it. In the 80s, with the current urban project, they returned to the load to make hollow to the new foundations of the buildings. According to some witnesses, the first floor was removed, but the deepest basement from the bunker, with Hitler’s private units, still remains hidden, flooded and sealed as if it were the sarcophagus of a pharaoh.
Before launching that urban operation they allowed entry to a group of photographers. Armed with flashlights, they found a ghostly atmosphere. All the furniture, including the dictator’s cabinets or the beds in which the six children of Goebbels died poisoned -bounded with names that began by H in honor of Hitler -, was muddy and rusty. The water had leaked and flooded part of the enclosure. There were almost no personal objects from their occupants. According to the witnesses, he kept smelling of dead down there.
Today some antiquarians still offer alleged relics obtained from the entire looting of the Führebunker: remains of the dishes with the swastika, uniforms of Hitler’s guard, maps of his war room … 99.9% of all that material is false. What is a real object is the bronze eagle with the black spider in its claws that crowned the Foreign Ministry and that the British soldiers of the Royal Engineers Regiment were taken as war loot. Today it can be seen in the Imperial War Museum in London, where it is possible (although not recommended) palpate your shrapnel holes.
Only a black, fat and old poplar, today survives from that garden of 1945. The rest was talked by the shrapnel of the battle of Berlin or by the construction of the wall, which passed just over this place to turn east to the east in the neighboring door of Brandemburg. His shadow reigns about the rest of younger trees and about Mrs. Weber, a neighbor of the neighborhood who has lived here for 15 years and has just parking her car. “When I moved here, I didn’t know anything about this place or about the stories I hid. They recently put these posters here indicating the site where Hitler committed suicide and then we understood. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I find it scary that this murderer would commit suicide a few meters from my house“He comments.
The one who does not exist today a localizable and recognizable body feed conspiracy of the most crazy, such as the Führer took a submarine that took him to Argentina, where he lived hidden for decades. The reality is that many witnesses of that suicide survived the assault of the bunker and their stories coincide. One of them is Truudl Junge, secretary of Hitler during those final days of the third Reich, whose testimony is mostly based on the book The sinkingby Joaquim Fest, whose film version has generated one of the memes More celebrated from the Internet, with Hitler’s anger to his generals of April 23 when trying to move armies that only existed on his map. The dictator’s assistants, Otto Günsche and Heinz Linge, later captured, helped burn the human remains and confirmed the facts to their Soviet captors.
The Red Army did not know about the existence of that bunker and It took a day to discover that Hitler had committed suicide. It was announced by the German general Krebs to the Russian general Chiukov on the night of May 1. Chuikov won a big surprise but put a poker face and said he was already aware. Then he picked up the phone and woke Stalin, who slept in Moscow, to give him the news. The Russian dictator put Iván Klimenko, an counterintelligence officer, to discover the whereabouts of the corpse and confirm the story told by the Nazis survivors. Four days after suicide, Klimenko found the burned bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun in the garden of the Foreign Ministry, half -soured in a crater that would be found today, according to one of the guides that shows the place to Italian tourists, in front of a bicycle shop and one of the scarce fragments of the Berlin wall that are still standing in the city.
To confirm his identity, Klimenko looked for the Führer’s personal dentist in ruins, whom he did not find, but his assistant, Käthe Heuserman. Thanks to her, the radiographs of her teeth were found in the Foreign Ministry and it was determined that those teeth were from the leader of National Socialism. The autopsy determined the death by cyanide and shot of a weapon. The dental pieces, a piece of the skull and the Walther PPK traveled to Moscow, while the rest of the body was buried and unearthed several times in secret locations never revealed by Klimenko.
Some isolated units – many composed of foreign volunteers from the SS – continued to fight in the city and the rest of Germany A few more days, many of them trying to make their way to the west to be arrested by the allies and not by the Soviet, whose captivity was guessed much worse. Finally, in the dining room of the School of Pioneers of Karlshors, and under the four flags of the victors (which are still in the same place), on May 8 the unconditional capitulation of the third Reich in Europe was signed on a wooden table with a green mat that smells old.
From the ashes of Führerbunker and those left Donald Trump T demad down these days as if he had a geopolitical demolition ball. From Hitler’s last dwelling we can walk about 100 meters to the memorial shocking of the Jews killed by Nazism, with their concrete grave forest, or reach the Checkpoint Charliethe border garrita that allowed you to move from the Soviet block to the western and vice versa, separated by the wall. Tourists drink chai tea in the gate of the corner, renamed Einstein Café, which at that time housed the adler coffee, a nest of spies.
That position, like the entire border, was kept by the United States, the influential Gendarme of the West. Now Trump has left the empty garita, like that of checkpoint charlie.