Inside Hitler’s Bunker: Rare and Unpublished Photos

 

Oberwallstrasse, in central Berlin, which saw some of the most vicious fighting between German and Soviet troops in the spring of 1945

 

 

 

 

This is a new view of a photograph that appeared, heavily cropped, in LIFE, picturing Hitler's command center in the bunker, partially burned by retreating German troops and stripped of valuables by invading Russians

 

Unpublished. This Vandivert shot not only captures the chaotic state of Hitler's bunker, but also features an item that recalls the wanton gangsterism that characterized Nazi rule: a 16th-century painting looted from a museum in Milan. In the typed notes (see next slide) that Vandivert sent to LIFE's New York offices immediately after getting to Berlin, he described his intense, harried visit to the bunker: "Note and note well," he wrote. "These pix were made in the dark with only candle for illumination ... Our small party of four beat all rest of mob who came down about forty minutes after we got there."

 

With only candles to light their way, war correspondents examine a couch stained with blood (see dark patch on the arm of the sofa) located inside Hitler's bunker. In his typed notes Vandivert wrote: "Pix of [correspondents] looking at sofa where Hitler and Eva shot themselves. Note bloodstains on arm of soaf [sic] where Eva bled. She was seated at far end .... Hitler sat in middle and fell forward, did not bleed on sofa. This is in Hitler's sitting room." Remarkable stuff -- but, it turns out, only about half right. Historians are now quite certain that Braun actually committed suicide by biting a cyanide capsule, rather than by gunshot -- meaning that the blood stains on the couch might well be Hitler's, and not Eva Braun's, after all.

Unpublished. LIFE war correspondent Percy Knauth (left) sifts through dirt and debris in the shallow trench in the garden of the Reich Chancellery where the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun are believed to have been burned after their suicides. Vandivert's typed notes around this scene include one of the more laconic of the photographer's sometimes-slangy observations of what he witnessed while exploring outside the bunker: "[S]hattered bird feeding box on tree trunk ... These bird feeding boxes are also seen all over the Berchtesgaden hangout [i.e., Hitler's mountaintop retreat in the Bavarian Alps]. Seems to have been a great thing with Hitler."

Unpublished. An SS officer's cap, with the infamous "death's head" skull emblem just barely visible. Of this image, Vandivert's notes state simply: "moldy SS cap lying in water on floor of sitting room."

A ruined, empty safe inside Hitler's bunker, April 1945.

Unpublished. Aerial view of bombed-out buildings and wrecked gasworks in and around the Schöneberg section of Berlin. Between August 1940 and March 1945, American, RAF, and Soviet bombers launched more than 350 air strikes on Berlin; tens of thousands of civilians were killed, and countless buildings -- apartment buildings, government offices, military installations -- were obliterated. Vandivert, LIFE reported, "found almost every famous building [in Berlin] a shambles. In the center of town GIs could walk for blocks and see no living thing, hear nothing but the stillness of death, smell nothing but the stench of death."

 

Unpublished. Above: An American soldier, PFC Douglas Page, offers a mocking Nazi salute inside the roofless, bombed-out ruins of the Berliner Sportspalast, or Sport Palace -- a venue where the Third Reich often held huge political rallies and where Hitler and others frequently speechified. Private Page is standing on the spot where Hitler usually stood while making speeches, before the building was destroyed during an Allied bombing raid on January 30, 1944.

Unpublished. Russian soldiers and an unidentified civilian struggle to move a large bronze Nazi Party eagle which once loomed over a doorway of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin

Unpublished. A common practice of soldiers through the centuries: scrawling graffiti to honor fallen comrades, insult the vanquished, or simply announce, I was here. I survived. "Columns at entrance into Chancellery gardens," wrote Vandivert of this eerie scene, "showing bomb and artillery wreckage and names of Russians who fell in fighting there."

Unpublished. An image almost too-perfectly symbolic of Berlin in the last weeks of April 1945: a crushed globe and a bust of Hitler lying amid rubble and debris outside the Reich Chancellery building