The remains of the WWII bunker in Tiergarten are not easily accessible. There are bushes, scrub and nettles to negotiate before finding the remains of the blasted bunker.

But once you’ve broken through, there’s no doubt about what you’re seeing.

There are several larger and smaller pieces of concrete in a larger area, some of which look like pieces from walls, while others look like pieces from the ceiling.

It is worth noting that the concrete is not steel reinforced. It’s ordinary concrete, which means that the bunker was not bombproof.

The missing rebar suggests that the bunker was not a military bunker, but what kind of bunker was it?

I’ve been looking for documentation and I haven’t found much. However, I have found a few things. An aerial photo.

See these two rings? It’s hard to see what it is on this old aerial photo from 1945, so I consulted some old maps of Tiergarten.

These two maps are from 1947 and 1951.

The first maps tell us that the red circle is the old forester’s house, which was demolished before 1951. And the green circle is where you can find the remains of the bunker today.

“War-Buildings are Being Blown Up in Berlin”

This was a headline from en English newspaper published on January 21st, 1947 with photos of a piller of smoke in Tiergarten.

A record from the magistrate’s office in Groß Berlin mentions that a 12 by 12 meter underground bunker with a concrete ceiling along Tiergarten-Ufer was blown up on January 20th, 1947 with 150 kilograms of explosives.

But beyond that, I haven’t found any documentation on who used the bunker. So now it’s anyone’s guess.

To sum up…

The bunker wasn’t very big, so there couldn’t have been room for many people. It’s not steel reinforced, so it’s probably not a military bunker.

And the bunker is less than a stone’s throw from the forester’s house.

One guess could be that the bunker was the forester’s private bunker. Some public officials under the Nazi regime who also had official residences had a bunker as part of their housing complex.

And since the forester did not belong to the top of the Nazi regime – like Hitler, Goebbels and Göring – he was not equipped with a luxury bunker, but instead with a simple air raid shelter for himself and his family.

But this is just a guess, and if you have a better guess – or have pictures or documentation, I’d love to hear from you in the comments or by email. Until then, the bunker fragments in Tiergarten remain a mystery.

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