By Roger Boyes

THE site of Hitler’s bunker, long one of Berlin’s best-kept secrets, is now officially a tourist attraction.

After more than 60 years the city has reversed a policy of concealing the location of the underground rooms where the Nazi leader steered the Third Reich towards its downfall, and where he killed himself with poison and a pistol. There is now a sign in German and English on the site, close to the Brandenburg Gate.

One in four visitors to the city is curious about the bunker but, until yesterday, was given no help in finding the patch of grass and concrete. “It was time to clear up some of the myths and legends,” said Dietmar Arnold, who heads Underworlds Berlin, an association that researches the bunkers and tunnels under the city.

Rochus Misch, 88, who was Hitler’s telephonist, agreed. “At last people can see the place where the Third Reich came to an end,” he said.

Yesterday Herr Misch attended the unveiling of the sign, only three yards away from where the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun, who married in the bunker, were burnt after they killed themselves on April 30, 1945.

The Führerbunker, which has impenetrable walls built to withstand bombing, was largely destroyed by Soviet troops after the war.

A car park and apartments stand on the site today. Tourists were bemused by the sign. “We had just been visiting the Holocaust memorial,” Dan Fischer, 43, from Santa Monica, California, said. “So this is where it happened?” The signposting of the bunker has made many uneasy. “This could become a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis,” Edo Schröder, 24, a travel guide, said. Many historians have criticised Berlin’s efforts to conceal the site of the bunker as an attempt to bury Germany’s own history.

The World Cup has helped to force some of the issues to the surface because Germany has had to deal with the use of Nazi architectural space.

The final will be played in the stadium built for Hitler’s 1936 Olympics. England play Trinidad & Tobago next week in a stadium in the middle of a vast parade ground where Hitler staged his Nuremberg rallies. The city has set up information pillars on the Holocaust so that fans can understand the sinister history of their surroundings.

After the war the Soviet Army blasted the bunker and destroyed some of its internal walls. In 1973 the Stasi secret police, worried that the British and US were digging tunnels under the Berlin Wall, began an exploration in the bunker.

They found a maze of cellars and passageways and identified Hitler’s office and bedroom, as well as those of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, his wife and their six children, but no secret tunnel to the West.

The last investigation of the bunker took place in 1988 when East Germany — a year before the state’s precipitate collapse — cleared out the wreckage before building apartments.

Tonnes of steel wiring and concrete were removed from the bunker. As a result, it was no longer possible to identify separate chambers.

Some historians have argued that the bunker should be treated as an archaeological site and restored, but too much high explosive has been sunk into Hitler’s last resting place.

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