A bitter row has erupted in Berlin over the fate of a former Nazi bunker, exposing what critics call a deliberate historical amnesia in Germany's capital. The concrete monolith, buried beneath a park in the city's Mitte district, was built by forced labourers in 1943 as an air-raid shelter for Nazi officials. Now, a British architectural firm has been brought in to transform it into a documentation centre, sparking outrage from local activists who want it demolished.
Sources confirm that the bunker, known as 'Bunker 17', was discovered during routine maintenance work last year. Documents obtained by this correspondent show that the Berlin Senate quietly approved a private development deal to turn the site into a museum, bypassing public consultation. The contract, worth an estimated €4.2 million, was awarded to London-based Studio Weissenhof, a firm with no prior experience in Holocaust memorialisation.
'This is whitewashing history,' said Dr. Ingrid Baumgart, a historian at the Free University of Berlin. 'They are bringing in British architects to sanitise a symbol of Nazi terror. It's a disgrace.' Local residents have formed a protest group, 'Demolish Bunker 17', which has gathered over 10,000 signatures on a petition. They argue that preserving the bunker would turn it into a 'tourist attraction' and trivialise the suffering of the forced labourers who built it.
But the architectural firm defends its plans. Senior partner Marcus Thornfield told me: 'Our design will expose the bunker's brutalist structure without glorifying it. We will include a permanent exhibition on the forced labour programme. This is about education, not erasure.' The firm's renderings show a glass pavilion grafted onto the concrete shell, with underground galleries.
The controversy is the latest in a long line of German struggles with its Nazi past. Unlike the well-documented Holocaust memorials in Berlin, smaller relics of the Third Reich often provoke heated debate. The bunker sits on land that was once part of the Reichsleitung, the Nazi party headquarters. After the war, the site was buried under rubble and later turned into a park. The bunker's existence was known but officially ignored for decades.
A leaked internal memo from the Berlin Senate's cultural department reveals concerns about the project's timing. 'We are walking a fine line,' the memo states. 'Any misstep will be seized upon by the far-right as evidence of German victimhood.' The memo, dated March 2024, recommends 'avoiding the term Nazi' in official communications.
Meanwhile, the forced labourers' families have not been consulted. I tracked down Anna Nowak, whose grandfather was one of the 300 Polish prisoners forced to build the bunker. 'They want to make money from my grandfather's pain,' she told me from her home in Warsaw. 'The bunker should be dismantled and the bricks used to build a school.'
The British architects have yet to comment on the allegations of historical amnesia. But Thornfield's assertion that the bunker represents 'a unique opportunity for reconciliation' rings hollow to those who see it as another example of Germany failing to confront its past. As one protester put it: 'They're renovating the toilet of the Third Reich.'
The Berlin Senate is due to vote on the project next month. If approved, construction will begin in 2025. But the row shows no sign of abating. With German elections looming, politicians are wary of taking sides. For the families of the victims, and the citizens of Berlin, the question remains: whose history is it to preserve?
