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BERLIN — On a Wednesday afternoon in late August, I traveled to a tourist attraction in the heart of Germany's capital. If I had no context, it would have seemed like a really weird place for tourists to congregate. It's a parking lot, surrounded by apartment buildings. On one side is Mimi Tea, a boba tea shop that has a cutesy cartoon bear on its storefront.
But the tourists don't come here for boba tea. They come here because buried beneath this dull patch of pavement lies the remains of a dark place of historical significance. It was underground here that, 80 years ago, one of the world's most infamous villains swallowed a cyanide capsule and fired a bullet into his brain. It was here that Adolf Hitler spent his last living moments.
The site is known in German as the Führerbunker, a subterranean bomb shelter that the Nazis built to protect their leader and his top henchmen from air raids during World War II. They built the bunker underneath the Reich Chancellery, a building complex that served as the Nazi government's headquarters.
The Reich Chancellery is long gone. Aboveground, there is no visible evidence that this place was once important, except a blue information plaque with a drawing of Hitler's bunker and a whole lot of text in tiny font.
I grabbed a boba tea and watched as swarms of tourists, sometimes led by tour guides, came to this site, squinted to read the plaque, and stared at a parking lot. Many tourists come here and get disappointed.
"If you don't know why people are standing in groups in a place where there is nothing to see — this is the Führerbunker," writes one tourist on TripAdvisor, a travel website. He rates the destination two out of five stars.
"I was very unhappy with this place," writes a tourist from Canada. One star.
"I wouldn't go out of your way to visit here," writes another tourist. "However, it is another thing to be 'ticked off the list.'"
Scholars have come to call tourism to places like the Führerbunker "dark tourism," which refers to sightseeing of destinations known for death, disaster, horror, or misery. Think of the millions of people who visit the Auschwitz concentration camp or the 9/11 Memorial or the Salem Witch Museum or the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site. This form of tourism — and the estimated $30 billion annual industry around it — is the subject of a rather sizable academic literature.
Peter Hohenhaus, the creator of dark-tourism.com and the author of a book titled Atlas of Dark Destinations, says you could consider Berlin the "capital" of dark tourism. Whether it's the Berlin Wall and the brutal history of communist East Germany, the Holocaust, or World War II, there are a lot of grim attractions for tourists in this city.
"Berlin is one of the few places where dark tourism and mainstream tourism overlap to a large degree," Hohenhaus says. "My website has more entries for that city alone than for most countries."
Like every other market, there's a demand side and a supply side to the market for dark tourism. The demand side raises questions like, why the heck do people want to spend their vacations visiting depressing places and contemplating morbid stuff? The data is spotty, but it suggests that this form of tourism has boomed in recent decades. What has been driving that?
Humans have been fascinated by death for basically forever. Some scholars have compared dark tourism to Romans watching gladiators die at the Colosseum or to the spectators of public executions during medieval times. They suggest this type of tourism may be driven by a kind of voyeurism, which leads people to get excitement or pleasure from getting close to death or horror while not really experiencing it themselves. There is something in human nature that causes us to do things like rubberneck when we pass car crashes and be more captivated by news stories when they involve blood.
Hohenhaus, who has dedicated much of his intellectual life to dark tourism, rejects the notion that demand for this type of sightseeing is motivated by voyeurism. "I don't do dark tourism for any kind of kick to be derived from learning about other people's misery," Hohenhaus says. "That's just not the point. It's the educational element that is in the foreground; plus the crucial element of place authenticity." Tourist motivations, of course, vary, and the reasons that they visit Auschwitz are likely very different than, say, Alcatraz or the London Dungeon.
But the supply side of dark tourism may be even more fascinating than the demand side. The suppliers of dark tourism often have to awkwardly walk a fine line between making money from the memory of historic atrocities or disasters or villains while paying heed to the political sensitivities around their subject matter.
The Führerbunker provides a particularly compelling case study in the economics of dark tourism. Why, despite the clear historic significance of this site — and the clear tourism demand to see it — is the bunker now just a boring parking lot? The story says a lot about modern Germany and its struggle to confront its dark past. And it also provides an interesting tale in the economics of "repugnant markets," or what happens when there's a market for something but a society considers that market to be revolting and seeks to discourage it.
A posthumous history of the Führerbunker
On the day I visited the Führerbunker site, I met up with Kay Heyne, a historian at the Berliner Unterwelten (or, in English, the Berlin Underworlds Association). The non-profit organization seeks to educate people about and preserve Berlin's vast number of underground archaeological sites, from tunnels dug to escape East Germany, to old beer and wine cellars, to the Führerbunker. It was the Berliner Unterwelten that placed an information plaque at the Führerbunker site back in 2006.
Almost immediately after Allied forces invaded Berlin in 1945, Heyne says, this place became a tourist attraction. Allied soldiers, government officials, journalists, and others came here. "They wanted to see the place where Hitler lived, where he made decisions, and where he died," Heyne says.
This particular part of Berlin was under the command of the Soviet Union during that time. And, Heyne says, Stalin didn't like that so many people flocked here. Soviet forces destroyed the Reich Chancellery and attempted to destroy the bunkers underneath.
The thing was that the Führerbunker had a roof made up of almost 12 feet of reinforced concrete and walls similarly sturdy. The subterranean structure was built to survive heavy bombing. The Soviets were able to destroy much of the interior and largely seal off the bunker. But the bones of the bunker survived early demolition attempts.
In 1961, East Germany built the Berlin Wall to prevent its people from escaping, and this particular area became part of the "death strip," or a no man's land, between East and West Berlin. Tourists and anyone else who dared come to the place would have to circumnavigate snipers perched in watchtowers, booby traps, and roaming guard dogs. Suffice to say, tourism at the Führerbunker halted during the Cold War.
Heyne says the inability to visit the Führerbunker only added to its lure. It became like one of those lost archaeological sites that Indiana Jones might try to explore.
In the late 1980s, East Germany was facing a housing shortage, and they started building more apartments. And authorities decided to reduce the width of the death strip and build a luxury apartment complex on its outer edge, close to the Berlin Wall. By building nice-looking apartments here, Heyne says, East German authorities wanted to advertise to West Berlin that their communist system was superior to the West's capitalist one.
While building these apartments, German construction crews reopened the Führerbunker and destroyed most of what was left, including its blast-proof ceiling. They then filled the bunker with sand, gravel, and rubble, and they buried it under the parking lot that stands there today.
Historians suggest that East German authorities believed that, by making the Führerbunker a soulless parking lot, they were reducing the site's mystique and preventing it from becoming a memorial to Hitler.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Modern Germany's struggle to overcome its dark past
In the 1990s, after the Berlin Wall fell and Germany reunified, Germans began reimagining what their new nation stood for. They also made Berlin the capital again, and they began redeveloping the central part of their newly reunified city. As the foundations for new buildings were laid, Heyne says, they began discovering all sorts of archaeological evidence of their past, including former Nazi bunkers. Germany had intense debates about how they should reckon with their dark history.
The Germans even have one of those long, amazingly precise words their language is known for to refer to this quest to grapple with their troubled past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Vergangenheit is the German word for "past" and Bewältigung is "coping" or "overcoming").
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Berlin began an intensive effort to memorialize the victims of the Nazi regime. Today, a short block away from the Führerbunker site lies a beautiful Holocaust monument called the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Also nearby is the Memorial to Europe's Sinti and Roma Murdered Under Nazism. "The Topography of Terror" museum documents horrors of the Gestapo and SS. And all around Berlin there are "Stolpersteine," or stumbling stones, which are placed in front of the residences of people taken by the Nazis. Made of brass, these cobble stone plates are typically etched with the names, birthdates, and fates of Nazi victims.
However, the politics of memory in Germany remain contentious. In 2017, Bjorn Höcke, a politician in the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, complained that Germans are the "only people in the world who planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital." Those comments created a firestorm of political controversy in Germany.
A repugnant market
As Germany made intensive efforts to memorialize Nazi victims in the 1990s and 2000s, they also had to grapple with what to do about infamous sites associated with Nazi perpetrators, like the Führerbunker. Over the years, Germans have shown resistance to anything that gives any whiff of memorializing — or even depicting — Hitler and his henchmen.
In 2008, for example, the wax museum Madame Tussauds opened up a new branch in Berlin. And, with much controversy, they unveiled a wax figure of Adolf Hitler. On the museum's opening day, a former policeman from Berlin entered the museum, jumped over a barrier, and decapitated wax Hitler. He reportedly screamed, "No more war!"
For years, the German government resisted even recognizing the location of the Führerbunker. Some found visitation of this site distasteful, and they feared any official recognition of it could help it become a kind of shrine for neo-Nazis.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth has developed a concept he calls "repugnant markets." This is when society has a distaste for particular kinds of market activity and may take actions to outlaw or discourage it. Examples he gives include prostitution, buying and selling human organs, ticket scalping, price gouging in the wake of disasters, and eating dog or horse meat. One might add dark tourism of politically sensitive places to Roth's list.
Heyne says that, despite official reluctance to recognize the location of the Führerbunker and offer anything interesting for tourists to see there, tourists, with the help of guidebooks, came to the site anyways.
Tourism to the Führerbunker really boomed after 2004, with the release of the movie "Downfall," which dramatized Hitler's last living days in the bunker. In fact, so many tourists flocked to the parking lot after the movie was released that the owners of the apartment complex reached out to Berliner Unterwelten.
Heyne says they heard tour guides and tourists were spreading misinformation about the site, like what really still existed underneath the ground (the real answer, Heyne says, is not much except some remnants of its foundation and walls). The owners of the apartment complex wanted the non-profit to put up a sign with accurate information.
And, so, in 2006, the Berliner Unterwelten, with the approval of government authorities, erected the information plaque that still stands there today, the only official recognition that this site has historical significance. They chose to make the sign in both German and English. It shows a schematic of the Führerbunker (and a connected bunker known as the Vorbunker) and a timeline of key events at the site. It has a German title, "Mythos und Geschichtszeugnis Führerbunker," or, in English, roughly, the myth and historical record of the Führerbunker.
One of the key events the sign highlights occurred on March 20, 1945, about six weeks before Hitler would take his own life. "From the 'Führerbunker,' Hitler issued the 'Nero Decree' — the destruction of all means of existence of the German civilian population," the sign states. "With this senseless order, Hitler displayed his contempt for his supposedly 'Beloved Germany.'"
Heyne says that the Berliner Unterwelten felt it was very important to highlight Hitler's order. "Much of the destruction of Germany that happened in 1945 was because of him," Heyne says. "His Nero Decree shows that he had not even a single thought about the people of Germany. It was always about him."
On the day I visited the Führerbunker and read the information plaque, there were three sandwich-board advertisements standing literally right behind the sign. They marketed a restaurant that served "All Day Brunch," a vintage bike shop, and Mimi Tea. Each were clearly trying to catch the eyeballs of anyone looking to learn about where Hitler commanded his military and committed suicide. The commercialization of such a morbid place was a bit surreal.
As time has passed — and Berlin has erected sprawling monuments to Nazi victims — Germans seem to have gotten a bit more comfortable with the idea that Hitler is a tourist attraction.
Perhaps recognizing that many tourists were coming to the Führerbunker and getting disappointed there was nothing there, a Berlin history museum, in 2016, unveiled a full replica of Hitler's bunker that tourists can now go to. (This is kind of similar to other repugnant markets; despite efforts to discourage or even ban a market, demand often proves irrepressible and finds willing suppliers. Think of the failure of Prohibition).
The museum, which is about a five-minute drive from the ruins of the real Führerbunker, is called "Berlin Story Bunker." When the Führerbunker replica was announced, some Germans criticized the museum for making money from what they suggested was a sort of Hitler Disneyland.
The museum's director Wieland Giebel, however, defended the exhibit. "We do not want to make a Hitler show here," Giebel told a German newspaper. "We want to show the end of World War II and what it means if national socialism controls society."
The Führerbunker replica continues to be part of an exhibit called "Hitler — How It Could Happen." It markets itself as the story of "How a modern, progressive, and cultured state can descend into barbarism in a very short time, culminating in unimaginable brutality and genocide."
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