Word: bunker
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Hitler by now lived and worked entirely underground, in a hidden mausoleum known as the Führerbunker. Dug in next to the Reich Chancellery in central Berlin, the bunker was nearly 60 ft. below street level; its earth-covered roof was 16 ft. thick (but leaky). It had 30 rooms, their concrete walls painted battleship gray. A staff of about 500 came and went. Here the Führer ate, slept, gave orders, shouted, raged. "Hitler never saw another sunrise or sunset after January," said an aide...
Director Oliver Hirschbiegel and writer/producer Bernd Eichinger have chosen the bunker as the setting of their film Downfall, loosely based on a book of the same title by Hitler-biographer Joachim Fest...
...perfect scene on which to attempt the almost impossible feat Downfall has attempted. For the lost bunker presents a microcosm of the perennial problem of forgetting in postwar German memory, the difficulty of dealing with a history so many of whose most significant events are so horrific that to memorialize them in positive fashion seems disrespectful, if not simply impossible...
...point of view, appeared in the 2002 documentary Blind Spot by Austrian multimedia artist André Heller. Much of the same material was the subject of a 2003 documentary in the BBC’s Days that Shook the World series, which also included a description of the bunker through Traudl’s eyes...
...after day, over the course of the film’s relentless two hours and 35 minutes, life in the bunker becomes a hypnotic, if horrific, mix. One after another of the innermost members of Hitler’s circle defy and abandon him. He mentally and physically deteriorates further and further (until when asking a confidante how to shoot himself, he is told he should take cyanide as well, lest his violently tremoring hand not be up to the task...