Every day and every night Adolf Hitler and his military chiefs would be inside the secret bunker, which had rooms above and below the ground, plotting the start of World War I and the invasion of Britain. Inside the bunker they first discussed the 1940 campaign against France and Operation Sea Lion which wanted to put Britain under the swastika.
Currently the bunker complex would cost too much money to be destroyed, but would also be inappropriate to sell and too important from an historic point of view to just ignore. While the government is yet to decide what could be done with it, the secret complex rots away somewhere in the woodland, about 35 miles north of Frankfurt.
Herr Petzinger, aged 66, was born long after the whole thing with Adlershorst, however, he was linked to it for over 30 years. He was given a job there after the Bundeswehr took over the place, at a time when the building was used to store munitions and other supplies and the woodland surrounding it was used by the modern German army as a training ground.
His job is now seen as the loneliest on the whole continent. All he has to do, everyday, is to check if anyone has broken in during the night, if the electricity is still functioning and if the anti-gas doors at the entrance of the bunker are still alright. “There is nothing much short of an atom bomb that could get rid of this place,” he said.
During the war, Hitler spent the majority of time at his Wolf’s Lair bunkers in East Prussia where he plotted the Nazi offensive against the Soviet Union and committed suicide in a little room beneath his chancellery in Berlin. But for the rest of the time Adlershorst was the place where great things were achieved and the plans he made inside the building, brought him the Blitzkrieg victories during the first two years of the Second World War.
Following the arrival of American soldiers at Adlershorst in 1945, the bunker complex was taken over by the German new peacetime army. The last soldiers left the bunker about fives years ago, the Express News reports.
SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Goering and Josef Goebbels all had their own rooms in the complex, which was also visited by Wernher von Braun, Ferdinand Porsche and IG Farben leaders.
“There was some interest a few years ago to turn it into a museum, featuring the rooms and the old air conditioning system. But there wasn’t the money,” said a government spokesman.