Hitler's bunker location marked
Former Hitler bodyguard Rochus Misch stands at the bunker's site
An information panel marking the site of the bunker where Adolf Hitler committed suicide at the end of World War II has been unveiled in Berlin.
It is the first time the authorities have allowed the site, just 200 metres (220 yards) from Berlin's Holocaust Memorial, to be officially identified.
There had been fears marking the site would attract right-wing extremists.
Hitler killed himself in the bunker at the end of April 1945 as Soviet troops closed in on the city.
The panel at the site shows the layout of the bunker together with archive photos and a chronology in German and English.
It was put together by a history society which runs guided tours of Berlin's network of underground bomb shelters, Berlin Underworlds, and wants to demystify the site.
"This is one of the most symbolic places in Berlin for the crimes the Nazis committed and we want to make sure people know the whole truth about it," said Sven Felix Kellerhoff.
Car park spot
One of Hitler's former bodyguards, 88-year-old Rochus Misch, who was at the unveiling, said people should be informed of history, even when it was the history of a devil.
"During the last 12 days of the war, I was down here with Hitler and the other bodyguards all the time," he said.
After the war, Soviet soldiers blew up most of the bunker, and in the 1980s the remaining foundation and walls were filled with rubble, making it inaccessible.
It is now buried under a car park surrounded by blocks of apartments built by the former East German government.
At last, a plaque marks site of Hitler's bunker
For decades, tourists have asked hapless Berliners for directions to Adolf Hitler's bunker; now, at long last, a plaque marks the site.
The sign gives details (in both German and English) of the layout and construction of the grisly subterranean labyrinth where the Nazi fuhrer took his life at the end of World War II.
Previously, Berlin had resisted giving an indication as to the location of the bunker for fear that it could become a symbolic gathering point for neo-Nazi groups.
Rochus Misch, a German Wehrmacht sergeant who was the SS telephonist in the bunker, is one of the last surviving members of the entourage that was ensconced with Hitler in the bunker in early 1945.
Now 88, he knows the mundane truth about the place and is eager to dispel the myths in frequent interviews.
"Too many myths were allowed to grow up about it - that it was a multi-storey shelter, that it was capable of holding hundreds of people," he says.
"In fact, it was small and cramped and dingy and smelled of blocked toilets and diesel fumes from the generator."
Visitors see that Hitler had a view from the French doors of his office out onto Brandenburg Gate, the US Embassy and a garden where the children of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels liked to play and where the Holocaust Monument now stands.
The bunker site is best found by tourists by starting at Brandenburg Gate and walking south along the street where the a new American embassy is now under construction.
