The vast majority of the diners at the Shisomen restaurant order their star dish: a delicious vegan ramen that would have delighted the most sadly famous resident of the neighborhood, that radical vegetarian who had his own office in this same place: Adolf Hitler. The former Reich Chancellery was located in what is now a central but nondescript urbanization in Berlin. The Nazi dictator committed suicide here, under a sand parking lot where Berliners take their dogs out to do their business.
One must travel back in time to April 30, 1945, to visualize a ruined Chancellery, with the Russians storming the neighboring Reichstag with bayonets and Hitler's last loyal followers carrying his lifeless body wrapped in a blanket alongside that of Eva Braun, who had become Eva Hitler the day before. Both had taken their lives about 8.5 meters below, in the two-story bunker complex built in the building's gardens a few years earlier.
The shelter, known as the Führerbunker, had solid walls and resources to withstand weeks of isolation. The man who set fire to Europe, conqueror of almost the entire continent, and mastermind behind some of the worst crimes in human history, burned in what is now the Gertrud-Kolmar-Strasse parking lot for hours, fueled by the 180 liters of gasoline obtained by his driver, Erich Kempka. Near him also burned the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels and the remains of their dog Blondie - with whom the effectiveness of cyanide capsules was tested - along with their four puppies, shot dead by bunker guards.
The first Soviet soldiers to enter that underground Titanic were not the hardened frontoviki, the frontline veterans who had raised the flag over the Reichstag, but a group of female soldiers. When they accessed the lower floors, they found some Nazi leaders sitting in armchairs with a gunshot to the head. The only one left alive was the technician in charge of keeping the generators running, Johannes Hentschel. When they saw him, they aimed their guns at him:
- He's dead. His body is burned outside.
The Soviet women entered his room and took perfumes, stockings, dresses, cosmetics, a gramophone with records... It was the first documented looting of the Führerbunker of the many that would come, mostly carried out by Red Army soldiers themselves, eager to take a war souvenir from the place where Hitler lived hidden his last days to die by the shot of a Walther PPK, James Bond's favorite weapon. Many collaborators urged him for weeks to flee Berlin as the Soviet armored columns advanced, but he dreamed of a Wagnerian ending and was terrified of ending up like his friend Benito Mussolini, hanged upside down at a gas station.
In that pathetic funeral pyre in the garden, the criminal project of Nazism was settled and a new era was inaugurated, giving rise to unthinkable alliances at that time, such as between the French and Germans or between Americans and Japanese, and dividing the world into two, separated by an infamous wall and an iron curtain. World War II had been initiated in September 1939 by Hitler and Stalin when they divided Poland and the Baltic countries. As if it were a nightmare hard to forget, the Soviets wanted to erase all physical traces of that Nazi regime.
The remains of the Chancellery were demolished in 1949, and the authorities of East Germany mined the bunker with explosives on several occasions, but its concrete was so solid that they could not destroy it. In the 1980s, with the current urban development project, they tried again to make room for the new building foundations. According to some witnesses, the first floor was removed, but the deepest basement of the bunker, with Hitler's private quarters, still remains hidden, flooded, and sealed as if it were a pharaoh's sarcophagus.
Before starting that urban operation, a group of photographers were allowed entry. Armed with flashlights, they encountered a ghostly atmosphere. All the furniture, including Hitler's wardrobes or the beds where Goebbels' seven poisoned children died - baptized with names starting with H in honor of Hitler - was moldy and rusted. Water had leaked in and flooded part of the premises. There were hardly any personal belongings left of the occupants. According to witnesses, it still smelled of death down there.
Today, some antique dealers still offer relics supposedly obtained from all the looting of the Führerbunker: remnants of crockery with swastikas, uniforms of Hitler's guard, maps of his war room... 99.9% of all that material is fake. One real object is the bronze eagle with the black spider in its claws that crowned the Chancellery and that the British soldiers of the Royal Engineers Regiment took as war booty. Today it can be seen at the Imperial War Museum in London, where it is possible (although not recommended) to feel with your fingers its shrapnel holes.
Only a black poplar tree, thick and old, survives today from that 1945 garden. The rest was felled by the shrapnel of the Battle of Berlin or by the construction of the Wall, which passed right over this place to turn towards the East at the nearby Brandenburg Gate. Its shadow reigns over the other younger trees and over Mrs. Weber, a neighborhood resident who has lived here for 15 years and has just parked her car. "When I moved here, I knew nothing about this place or the stories it hid. Recently, they put up these signs here indicating the spot where Hitler committed suicide, and then we understood. I don't believe in ghosts, but it's terrifying to think that this murderer killed himself a few meters from my house," she comments.
The fact that there is no identifiable and recognizable corpse today fuels the most absurd conspiracy theories, such as that the Führer took a submarine to Argentina, where he lived hidden for decades. The reality is that many witnesses of that suicide survived the bunker assault, and their stories coincide. One of them is Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary during those final days of the Third Reich, whose testimony is mainly based on the book Downfall by Joachim Fest, whose film version has generated one of the most celebrated Internet memes, with Hitler's reprimand to his generals on April 23 when trying to move armies that only existed on his map. The dictator's aides, Otto Günsche and Heinz Linge, captured later, helped burn the human remains and confirmed the facts to their Soviet captors.
The Red Army was unaware of the existence of that bunker and took a day to discover that Hitler had committed suicide. German General Krebs announced it to Russian General Chuikov on the night of May 1. Chuikov was greatly surprised but kept a poker face and claimed he was already aware. He then picked up the phone and woke up Stalin, who was sleeping in Moscow, to give him the news. The Russian dictator put Ivan Klimenko, a counterintelligence officer, in charge of finding the whereabouts of the corpse and confirming the story told by the Nazi survivors. Four days after the suicide, Klimenko found the burned bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun in the Chancellery garden, semi-buried in a crater that today, according to one of the guides showing the place to some Italian tourists, would be located in front of a bicycle shop and one of the few remaining fragments of the Berlin Wall still standing in the city.