Paul Sullivan heads underground to explore an immaculately preserved World War Two bunker…
Most passengers passing through S-Bahn Gesundbrunnen don’t think twice about the door at the bottom of the stairs. Why should they? It’s a plain old door, indistinguishable from a normal private entrance or storage area. But if you opened the door you’d be face-to-face with bonafide Nazi history, in the shape of one of Berlin’s best-preserved war bunkers.
The door is locked of course, but not inaccessible thanks to the (non-profit) Berliner Unterwelten society, who organise tours through a range of underground historical spaces in the city.
Turn up at the society’s ticket kiosk (located outside the station, at Brunnenstraße 105) on one of their allocated tour days, and you’ll soon find yourself on the other side of the mysterious time portal, enclosed in a concrete stairwell and surrounded by original Nazi-era signage bearing strange phrases like Männer Abort.
“It means Men’s Toilet,” explains Dominic, our affable, jocular guide. “The Nazis were not keen on using the French word toilette, nor the Anglo-American abbreviation W.C., for obvious reasons. There was no German word, aside from Scheisse-Haus, which would have been too long to put on the walls. So they dug up this strange, archaic word, Abort”.
Discovered in 1999, filled with rubble and untouched since the 60s, this bunker—built in 1941—was an extension of the restrooms and sleeping quarters built in the 1920s for the train drivers, Gesundbrunnen being the last stop on the line. The entire structure takes up 1,300 square metres and was built to hold 1,200 people—though in reality anywhere between 5-6,000 would be using it during an air raid, a terrifying figure when you consider the potential for panic, lack of air, food and water.
In any case, the bunker was mostly an illusion in terms of its ability to protect; real bomb-proof bunkers had walls and ceilings two metres thick—the ones here are less than a metre. Any direct hits would have been catastrophic.
