The Führerbunker lay about 8.5 metres below the garden of the old Reich Chancellery, beneath an older shelter called the Vorbunker. Hitler had moved into it in mid-January 1945, and by late April it held him, Eva Braun, Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda with their six children, Martin Bormann, the generals Hans Krebs and Wilhelm Burgdorf, secretaries, guards and orderlies. On 30 April, as Soviet troops fought their way into the Reichstag about a mile to the north, Hitler shot himself there.

In the bunker

The bunker was small, damp and crowded. Its rooms were reached down a stairway from the Vorbunker; a second exit led up into the Chancellery garden. Communications with the outside depended on a single radio set and on telephone lines that were cut one by one. On 26 April Colonel General Robert Ritter von Greim, summoned to Berlin, was flown into the city by the pilot Hanna Reitsch, who landed a light aircraft on the East-West Axis near the Brandenburg Gate. Hitler named Greim commander of the Luftwaffe in place of Göring.

On the evening of 28 April the bunker learned from a Reuters report on the BBC that Himmler had offered, through Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross, to surrender to the Western Allies. Hitler ordered his arrest. Himmler’s liaison officer in the bunker, SS General Hermann Fegelein, who was married to Eva Braun’s sister and had been found in civilian clothes in his apartment, was shot in the Chancellery garden that night.

Marriage and testament

Shortly after midnight on 28–29 April Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in the bunker, conducted by a Berlin municipal official brought in for the purpose. Afterward he dictated his private and political testaments to his secretary, Traudl Junge. The political testament blamed the Jews for the war, expelled Göring and Himmler from the Nazi Party, and named Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as Reich President and Goebbels as Reich Chancellor. Copies were sent out of the city by courier; at least one set was later found by Allied intelligence.

On 29 April news arrived that Mussolini had been shot by Italian partisans on 28 April. Late that night Hitler asked for a report on the relief attacks. The answer, sent by Keitel and received in the early hours of 30 April, was that Wenck’s 12th Army had been stopped south of Potsdam and could not reach the city, and that the 9th Army was surrounded. Weidling told Hitler on the evening of 29 April that the defenders would run out of ammunition within a day or two.

30 April

Around 1530 on 30 April Hitler shot himself in his study in the bunker; Eva Braun took cyanide beside him. On his earlier orders their bodies were carried up into the Chancellery garden, doused with petrol and burned in a shell crater, under Soviet artillery fire. Goebbels, now nominally chancellor, sent General Krebs, who spoke Russian, across the lines that night to negotiate. Krebs met Chuikov at his headquarters in Tempelhof in the early hours of 1 May and told him that Hitler was dead. Stalin, informed by telephone, insisted on unconditional surrender, and Krebs returned with nothing.

On the evening of 1 May Magda Goebbels had her six children killed with cyanide, and she and Goebbels then killed themselves. Krebs and Burgdorf shot themselves in the bunker. That night most of the remaining occupants tried to break out of the city in groups. Bormann died near the Lehrter railway station; his remains, found in 1972, were identified by DNA testing in 1998. Others, including Junge and Hitler’s pilot Hans Baur, were captured or got through. Soviet counter-intelligence (SMERSH) found the remains of Hitler and Braun in early May and identified Hitler from dental records, but Stalin kept the findings secret for years and publicly suggested that Hitler had escaped.

The Reichstag

The Reichstag building had not been used by parliament since the fire of February 1933, and its dome was a burned-out frame. But to the Red Army it was the symbol of Germany, and Soviet commanders had told their troops for weeks that the war would end when the Red flag flew over it. The building was defended by a mixed force of perhaps 1,000 men of the SS, Volkssturm, naval and other units, with machine guns in the windows and guns in the Tiergarten and the Zoo flak tower behind.

The 150th Rifle Division under Major General Vasily Shatilov and the 171st Rifle Division under Colonel Alexei Negoda, both of the 79th Rifle Corps of the 3rd Shock Army, attacked across the Königsplatz from the Ministry of the Interior on 30 April. Their first attacks were stopped by fire from the building and from the Kroll Opera. In the afternoon and evening, supported by tanks and heavy guns, they broke into the building, and that night soldiers placed red flags on the roof. The fighting inside went on through 1 May, room by room and in the cellars, and the last defenders surrendered on 2 May.

The flag that the Soviet state later designated as the Victory Banner was the assault flag of the 150th Rifle Division. Official accounts credited two soldiers of the division, Sergeant Mikhail Yegorov and Junior Sergeant Meliton Kantaria, led by Lieutenant Alexei Berest, with raising it over the building, and they were honoured as heroes. Other soldiers also put flags on the building that night, and veterans argued for decades about who was first. The banner is in the Central Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow.

The flag photographs

The most famous image of the battle was taken on 2 May, after the building had been taken, by the Soviet photographer Yevgeny Khaldei. Khaldei had brought a flag with him, made from tablecloths, and he asked soldiers he met near the Reichstag to climb onto the roof and pose with it. The soldier holding the flag in the published image was Alexei Kovalyov; the man holding his legs was Abdulkhakim Ismailov. Before publication the image was retouched: smoke was added to the background, and a second wristwatch on Ismailov’s arm, which could have suggested looting, was removed.

That the photograph was staged does not make it false: Soviet soldiers did take the Reichstag and did raise flags over it on 30 April. Khaldei’s picture was published in the magazine Ogonyok on 13 May 1945 and became the Soviet counterpart to Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph, taken in February 1945. The story of that photograph and the Marines who raised the flag is told in the Iwo Jima collection.

Weidling surrenders

With Hitler dead and the negotiations of 1 May refused, Weidling decided to surrender the city on his own authority. On the night of 1–2 May he sent officers across the lines to arrange it. Early on 2 May he went to Chuikov’s headquarters in Tempelhof, where he signed an order to the garrison to stop fighting. Its text explained that Hitler was dead and that every hour of further fighting prolonged the suffering of the population. Soviet loudspeaker trucks and German officers carried the order through the city.

Most of the garrison surrendered during 2 May. The Soviet command announced the capture of 134,000 prisoners in Berlin. Small groups went on fighting or tried to break out to the west for another day or two. Weidling was taken to the Soviet Union, where he died in custody at Vladimir in 1955. In the evening of 2 May, Moscow celebrated the capture of Berlin with a salute of 24 salvos from 324 guns.

Gallery · 6 photographs · select to enlarge

The government quarter after the battle

The Chancellery and the bunker afterward

Soviet troops reached the Chancellery on 2 May. They found the bodies of Goebbels and his wife in the garden near the bunker exit, and the bodies of the six children in the bunker. Soviet officers, soldiers and journalists toured the ruined building in the days that followed, and many took souvenirs from Hitler’s study and the great marble gallery. The bunker itself was flooded and partly stripped.

The Soviets later demolished the Chancellery, and in 1947 they tried without complete success to blow up the bunker, as the photograph above shows. Stone from the building is widely said to have been reused in Soviet memorials and in a Berlin underground station, though the details are disputed. The remains of the bunker were largely removed or buried in the late 1980s, when East Germany built apartment blocks on the site. Today it lies under a car park and a small information board.

Sources and further reading

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