Eighty years ago, at the end of the Second World War, the Allies made a concerted effort to erase Hitler and his legacy from German public life. They banned the Swastika and other Nazi symbols. They changed the names of the streets and squares, and removed Hitler’s portraits and busts from all public offices. Germans went along with this erasure enthusiastically, because they too wanted to move on. Hitler belonged to the past. They wanted to keep their eyes on a less embarrassing future.
And yet, the more that was erased, the more omnipresent Hitler became. As any psychologist will tell you, memories do not disappear just because you wish to repress them. Today it is impossible to visit Berlin without seeing Hitler’s ghost everywhere you go. Even – perhaps especially – in buildings and places that no longer exist…
In 1945, the first thing to be erased was Hitler’s body itself. In the last days of the war, when Berlin was surrounded and under constant bombardment, Hitler retreated to the bunker beneath the gardens of the Reich Chancellery. Since it was obvious that his reign was over, this man – who has come to be known as the greatest monster of the twentieth century – decided to take his own life. It seems that his decision was made partly to deny anyone else the satisfaction of killing him, but mostly so that he could control what happened to his body. He had heard what had happened to Mussolini, whose corpse had been abused and beaten by a crowd, and then hung by its feet from a petrol station in Milan. He didn’t want his own body to be subjected to the same indignities.
So, on 30 April, two days after the death of Mussolini, Hitler shot himself. His long-term mistress, now wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide at the same time by biting on a cyanide capsule. Then, in accordance with Hitler’s written instructions, their bodies were carried to a bomb crater outside, doused with petrol, and burned. After the bodies had been consumed, the crater was covered over with earth and rubble.
When Berlin fell to the Soviets a few days later, a team of SMERSH counter-intelligence agents went in search of Hitler’s body. They found his and Eva Braun’s remains in their shallow grave, along with those of Hitler’s propaganda minister Josef Goebbels and his wife (who had also killed themselves and their children shortly after their leader’s suicide). Their bodies were taken away to be examined, and Hitler was soon identified by his dental records.
The Soviet authorities were then presented with a problem: what should they do with the bodies? At first they buried them in a forest in Brandenburg, but this was considered insufficiently secure. So a few months later they were exhumed and moved to a SMERSH facility in Magdeburg. In 1970, to put an end to any possibility of Hitler’s burial site becoming a shrine, all the bodies were exhumed one final time: they were thoroughly burned and crushed, and the ashes were dumped into a nearby river to be flushed away to the sea.
Without a body, there could be no tomb; but there remained the worry that Hitler’s bunker might become a shrine instead. After all, this was the place where he had committed suicide, which gave it a kind of totemic power. The last thing the Soviets wanted was for it to become a symbol around which neo-Nazis could regroup.
Accordingly, they went about destroying the site as comprehensively as they had destroyed Hitler’s body. This was no easy task. The bunker had been built to withstand the biggest bombs in the Allied arsenal. Its ceiling was made of reinforced concrete 3.5 metres thick, and its walls were even thicker. When Red Army pioneers tried to blow the place up in 1947, they succeeded in destroying the entrance and the ventilation towers, and many of the interior walls, but the main structure remained largely intact.
In 1959 they tried again. Further blasts were carried out, the entrances were filled in, and a mound of earth was piled over the top of the reinforced concrete. But various tunnels still existed, and the East German secret police were able to open the bunker up again in 1967 to photograph it.
In the 1980s, the East Berlin authorities decided to remove all outward signs of what lay beneath the ground. They erected an apartment complex on the site of the old Reich Chancellery: while they were digging the foundations, they also removed the concrete roof of the bunker and filled the entire structure with gravel, sand and other debris. The area was levelled and a car park planned on top of it. As far as the eye could see, all traces of the bunker had gone.
There is still no shrine here, even today. There is no museum, or tourist recreation of Hitler’s bunker. There is not even a plaque or a stone to mark where the bunker once stood, just a rather shabby information board at the side of the road with some dry text in German and English describing the history of the building.
I have been to this place a few times now, but only ever for a few minutes at a time. This is not out of any scruples about ‘paying homage’ to Hitler, but because there is really little to see here. That’s exactly as it is intended to be: it is not a place to visit if you want to feel chills down your spine, or to daydream about the Führer and his legacy. There isn’t even a bench to sit down on.
And yet there is still something slightly disturbing about the place. The attempt to erase all traces of Hitler in this way is reminiscent of some of the totalitarian actions carried out by the Nazis themselves: the annihilation of Lidice, for example, or the razing of Warsaw. Perhaps this is appropriate. Nevertheless, it feels like an exercise in denial. Berlin might like to pretend that this place is just an ordinary block of flats with an ordinary car park in front of it, but it is not, and never can be. Hitler’s bunker will always be there, just beneath the surface.
Berlin is filled with sites like this – places that aren’t there, but whose presence can be felt nevertheless. Hitler’s bunker was not the only historically significant building to be destroyed after the war. Nearby, on Wilhelmstrasse and Prinz Albrecht Strasse, stood the headquarters of the SS, the Reich Security Main Office and the other major organs of state terror. These buildings had been notorious during the Nazi era, particularly the Gestapo headquarters at No. 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse, where ‘enemies of the state’ had been interrogated and tortured. Despite some bomb damage, there is no reason why this building could not have been rebuilt after the war. Instead, parts of it were pulled down in the early 1950s, and the rest was finally blown up in 1956.
No attempt was made to commemorate what had once stood here until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It has since been converted into a memorial site and information centre called “The Topography of Terror”. But at its heart is still a feeling of absence. The main memorial site is deliberately and ostentatiously empty. Where once stood the offices devoted to terrorising the people, there is now a field of rubble. Nothing is allowed to grow here. There is not a single plant or blade of grass: it is completely barren. This is the legacy of Nazism: death, emptiness, nothingness.
Ever since the 1980s there has been a boom of memorialisation in Berlin. It is as if the pendulum has swung the other way: rather than trying to forget the past, the city is trying to remember every last horrific detail of it. Within walking distance of Hitler’s absent bunker there are dozens of other memorial sites, each one more important than the last. There is the vast field of blocks that make up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe just by the Brandenburg Gate. There is the Jewish Museum, the memorial to murdered Sinti and Roma, the memorial to persecuted homosexuals, the Neue Wache memorial, the book-burning memorial in Bebelplatz, the memorial to the German resistance, the ‘Stolpersteine’ placed in the ground outside the houses of Jews who were taken away – the list goes on. Almost every building on Wilhelmstrasse has an information board outside it explaining its history and how it was used during the Second World War. Sometimes it seems as if the whole of central Berlin is an open air museum dedicated to its troubled wartime and Cold War past.
This overwhelming wealth of information, and the sense of universal guilt that comes with it, can feel stifling even to outsiders. When I first brought my children to see Berlin, their initial enthusiasm for the city’s history was gradually crushed beneath the sheer weight of depressing detail: they felt compelled to turn away and concentrate their efforts on Berlin’s more contemporary delights. If this is the way that English teenagers experience Germany’s history, how must German teenagers feel, who are obliged to live with that history every day?
And yet, what is the alternative? Either we acknowledge our history or we don’t: there is nothing we can do to change it.
Germans, just like everyone else, switch between these two positions – acknowledgement and denial – depending on their own shifting circumstances and the political atmosphere of the times in which they live. When they are feeling brave, they will face up to their history. They will grimly admit that most institutions, most corporations, most buildings and most families have some kind of Nazi past; and they will gird their loins for the perennial battle to prevent that past from reasserting itself in the present day. There is a little piece of Hitler, they will say, in everything we do; and we forget this at our peril.
But every now and then the uncompromising bleakness of the past will be too much for them, and they will turn away. They begin to look for excuses that will free them of their historic burden. On such occasions the omnipresence of Hitler becomes a kind of comfort. If all the evils of National Socialism can be gathered together and placed at Hitler’s door, if this one monster can shoulder all the responsibility for the past, then everyone else is free to breathe once more. In this way, Hitler has become a kind of dark Messiah, whose evil presence absolves the rest of society of guilt for the sins of the past.
It is perhaps for this reason that the image of Hitler, though purged from German society in 1945, is still so prevalent in the country today. He appears in bestselling books by Joachim Fest or Volker Ullrich, and in history documentaries by Guido Knopp or Ullrich Kasten. He appears in award-winning movies such as Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, which recreates the scenes in Hitler’s bunker more vividly than any tourist attraction could ever manage. He appears in debates between journalists and between politicians. And in all internet discussions, according to Godwin’s Law, it is only a matter of time before his memory is invoked by one party or the other.
I sometimes wonder what the victorious Allies of 1945 would have made of all this. When they tore down the statues and busts of Hitler, and changed the name of the streets and squares named after him, they must have imagined that they had dispensed with this monstrous warmonger for good. When they watched the people hurriedly destroying the portraits of Hitler that used to hang on their walls, and burning their copies of the once omnipresent Mein Kampf, they must have hoped that Germans would be too ashamed ever to invoke his memory again. The comprehensive annihilation of his body was supposed to symbolise all this and mark a definitive ending.
And yet today, in the twenty-first century, Hitler’s memory seems to be stronger than ever. All it takes to bring him back to life is an outstretched arm, or a sketch of a slanting fringe above a black toothbrush moustache. In 2012, when Timur Vermes published his fantastically successful novel Er ist wieder da (‘He’s Back Again’ or ‘Look Who’s Back’), there was no need to explain who ‘He’ was. The central message of the book, that his presence is still alive and thriving in Germany, is one that seemed to resonate with almost everyone.
Hitler has no tomb, but he doesn’t need one. Even without a physical body, or a shrine in his honour, his memory continues to live alongside us whether we like it or not.
