Museum To Recreate Hitler’s Suicide Bunker, Insists It’s Not ‘Pilgrimage Site’

The Top Secret Spy Museum in Oberhausen, Germany, plans to recreate Hitler’s Führerbunker, the site of the dictator’s suicide. The director of the museum insists that the exhibit is purely for education and will be made with “sensitivities” in mind.

The bunker exhibit will feature five rooms: Hitler’s two personal rooms, the radio control room, his physician’s clinic, and his secretary’s office. The recreated bunker is based off of floor plans from the federal archives, as well as pictures and other documentation. According to i24 News, the architects are even looking at the sets from the movie The Downfall, which depicts Hitler’s last months of life.

The museum’s director, Ingo Mersmann, told the Local that he wanted the exhibit to be detailed, but sensitive.

“We want this to be an educational experience so that families or groups of school kids can see how it really was: To experience the tiny rooms and the dampness of the bunker. We want to recreate it to show people. We are doing so very carefully and with sensitivity.”

For starters, portraits of Adolf Hitler, present in the real-life Führerbunker, will not be recreated. Instead, the architects will replace them with empty black picture frames.

It also helps that the museum is in Oberhausen, well outside of Berlin, where the real Führerbunker used to be.

Mersmann explained the following.

“We certainly don’t want to recreate a place for the misguided people who still see him as a hero to come as a pilgrimage.”

The German government has the same policy. The original bunker, which was between Potsdamer Platz and Brandenburg Gates in Berlin, is now just a car park. It was destroyed in 1947 (shown above), but then left undisturbed until the car park construction in 1988. According to the Huffington Post, in 2006, the government made a plaque on the site, giving a brief description of its historical significance.

Top Secret Spy Museum has never been afraid of controversy. Before plans for Hitler’s bunker, Mersmann recreated Osama bin Laden’s hiding place. They also have Fidel Castro’s hat, and props from James Bond movies.

Still, Hitler’s bunker might become the museum’s most popular attraction. As previously reported by the Inquisitr, memorabilia from the former dictator can go for thousands of dollars at auction. His copy of Mein Kampf even sold for about $30,000, proving that there is still a lot of curiosity surrounding the mass-murdering dictator.

Hopefully, the museum does not receive unwelcome neo-nazi visitors, wanting to visit Hitler’s recreated bunker for all the wrong reasons.

[Image via German Federal Archive/Wikimedia Commons]