In February 2019, I had to travel to Berlin for work, so I decided to arrive a day early to meet up with my good friend Toeppi from "Fotodokumentationen" to check out a few abandoned places. Toeppi had arranged for us to be granted access to an otherwise locked air-raid shelter from World War II to take some photos - a rather rare opportunity in the city of Berlin.
I took the early morning train to Berlin where Toeppi was already waiting to drive us to the location. Once there, we met up with another party of interested persons and the guy who had the key.
The bunker had been constructed in a manner that made it look more like a house - it had a pitched roof and even a console frieze. That way, it could be integrated more easily into future developments that the Nazis had planned for after the war.
As the door opened, we first stepped into a kind of airlock that separated the access door from the rest of the bunker. Behind the airlock, there was the main stairwell with the corridors. I was surprised at the condition that the building was in. You could see that it was once a bunker, and that it still was the original concrete, but the various uses after World War II didn't pass without a trace - the walls had been painted over, and even some of the walls of the individual rooms had been removed to change the layout of the floors. There was even electric light, so I didn't really need to get out my flashlight while roaming through the rooms.
In the end, this wasn't the most spectacular bunker that I've ever had the pleasure of exploring, but it still is a part of Berlin's history. It was an interesting place to check out in any case - especially since not too long after our visit, the door was forced open, and the interior was vandalized. So the photos you see in this post are likely to be some of the last ones that show the bunker in its "post-war-glory".
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