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A heritage association warned Tuesday that a bunker beneath the former site of Adolf Hitler's chancellery in central Berlin could be demolished to make way for a new housing project.
The Berliner Unterwelten association, dedicated to preserving the city's rich underground history, says the bunker in question is one of four that have survived among the many built by the Nazis in the district around the Brandenburg Gate.
Covering an area of around 1,250 square meters (13,450 square feet), the bunker is "a historic site that absolutely must not be destroyed," Dietmar Arnold, president of Berliner Unterwelten, told a press conference Tuesday.
Its immediate neighbor, the Fuehrerbunker, was part of the same complex where the German dictator committed suicide at the end of the war together with his wife Eva Braun. That bunker has been partially destroyed and is not accessible.
The city government says building new housing must take precedence in the German capital, with residents frequently complaining about soaring rents and the difficulty of finding accommodation.
The issue has become a key campaign theme in the run-up to next month's election for the city's state assembly. "We are not going to oppose the construction of new housing in order to preserve a bunker that could then become a site of pilgrimage," Berlin's deputy construction minister Christian Gaebler recently told the Bild daily.
The newspaper reported that the proposed construction project at the site involves building 66 new apartments but would require the destruction of what remains of the bunker.
Arnold on Tuesday stressed that his association is "not blocking the construction of new housing. The remaining part of the bunker can quite easily be built over," he said. Arnold dismissed the claim the site could become a site of pilgrimage for Hitler's admirers, calling it a "spurious argument."
Berliner Unterwelten organizes tours of underground historic sites and welcomes 330,000 visitors a year, including to a former Nazi bunker, he said. "We've never seen this sort of pilgrimage site in this city," he went on.
Built by architect Albert Speer for Hitler in the 1930s, the New Reich Chancellery, which also served as a shelter for women and children during the war, was destroyed above ground by the Soviet military administration in the years after the Nazis' defeat.
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