From the Buried Bunker, Hitler’s Ghost Still Haunts Berlin’s Psyche, 70 Years On

A bust of Adolf Hitler lies amid the ruins of the
Reich Chancellery in 1945.

THE GUARDIAN: As the anniversary of the Nazi leader’s death approaches, there is a divide between the wish to avoid the shameful past and a need to acknowledge it

Berlin is the capital of Europe’s economic powerhouse, a vibrant city with a rich cultural life and a palpable sense of growing confidence. But if its future looks brighter than in generations, it also has an awful lot of dark history weighing on its civic conscience.

This Thursday marks the 70th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s death but, like his birthday last Monday, it will understandably go unmarked. For many years the spot where he killed himself was also unmarked. The past can be an unwanted presence in Berlin.

It is, after all, only 25 years since a huge concrete wall separated east from west and communism from capitalism. At first, in an effort to reunify the divided city, the site of the demolished wall was so comprehensively built over that it was hard to know it had been there.

Tourists became so baffled that a cobblestone outline was laid down in the centre of town to show where the wall had stood.

Today there are also a couple of preserved sections of the wall, a Checkpoint Charlie display, a dedicated museum and even kitsch celebrations of the infamous East German car, the Trabant. After a period of determined “moving on”, the German capital has grown more at ease with the past that it was in such a rush to escape.

But less so in the case of the past that originally led to the city’s division – the Nazi era. There are few surviving buildings or monuments to testify to the period in which Berlin was the Nazi capital, when it was to become Welthauptstadt Germania – an Albert Speer-designed world capital of a massively expanded German nation. » | Andrew Anthony | Saturday, April 25, 2015

THE GUARDIAN: The human Hitler: The first German film to feature an actor playing the Führer opened this week. But by depicting him as a complex character, does it diminish the evil that he did? Or is Germany finally coming to terms with its past? The acclaimed Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw offers his verdict » | Ian Kershaw | Friday, September 17, 2004