![]() ![]() ![]() Photo by Berliner Unterweltenĭown a flight of stairs, we find two glass cases featuring artifacts like gas masks-made by slave labor from concentration camps-and a board game that taught children what to do in a bomb raid. Locking doors once enclosed the bunker’s toilets, but they were removed whenĭesperate Berliners seized a moment of solitude to commit suicide. Never enough for the ladies, is there?” Jackson quips, before undermining his momentary levity by revealing that the cubicles around the toilets were removed after desperate souls took advantage of the locking doors to commit suicide. There were tales of people being crushed to death,” our guide says, leading us through a doorway marked “Zum Frauen-Abort.” In this passage-the women’s bathroom–about half-a-dozen toilets line one wall. Air raids were so frequent that Berliners rushed to shelters roughly every 48 hours. “Ninety percent of Berlin was damaged 27 percent was smashed to bits,” Jackson reveals. But because civilians used this bunker, rather than the regime, visitors are allowed to explore it with a guide, and the experience offers a grim glimpse into the wartime uncertainties and fears that gripped Europe in the 40s. The government is adamant about avoiding the creation of any kind of shrine to the Nazis, who perpetrated such unimaginable horrors. “Above ground, there’s very little left from the Second World War, but underground, everything the Nazis (which he pronounces ‘Nasties’) built or used is roughly still here,” explains Jackson, who leads this “Dark Worlds” tour for the Berliner Unterwelten, an association dedicated to documenting the city’s air raid shelters, caverns and abandoned railway tunnels. I’ll only spend 90 minutes in these dank chambers, but between 19, up to 5,000 Germans at a time whiled away countless hours in this dim labyrinth, illuminated by toxic glow-in-the-dark paint, listening for the drone of airplane engines and the booming of bombs. It’s definitely the direst tour introduction I’ve ever heard, but this is hardly your typical “attraction.” I’m huddled with perhaps 30 other tourists in a concrete passageway-the first of 30 rooms in a subterranean warren that twists and turns down three levels within the Gesundbrunnen U-bahn station in Berlin. “So touching the walls, licking the walls (has anyone ever actually DONE that, I wonder?)-not a good idea,” he advises. They’re covered in poisonous paint,” advises Nick Jackson, a bespectacled English bloke in a construction orange vest. Photo by Berliner Unterwelten e.v./ Dietmar Arnold. Room lined with display cases filled with personal artifacts taken from German and Russian soldiers killed in action.
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