CITY HAUNTED I

AM in Berlin. This metropolis of nearly 3.6 million has been bombed to hell and back, but now it is one of the fastest growing cities in the world.

The cranes came out and the cement started being poured after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. World War II is omnipresent. The Brandenburg Gate, the remnants of the wall that divided the city into East and West for 28 years, Checkpoint Charlie, the Topography of Terror museum located in the heart of Berlin on the site of what used to be Murder Central – the old Gestapo/ss headquarters. Just a stone’s throw away is the concrete block Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

The Sachsenhausen death camp located on the edge of a pretty, flower-potted village is just 45 minutes by train from Berlin. Last but not least there is a nondescript carpark that covers what used to be the bunker in which Adolf Hitler, 56, ate cyanide before eating his own gun, a Walther PPK 7.65. His girlfriend and wife at the time of their death, Eva Braun, 33, (the jury is out on Adolf’s sexual proclivity) suffered the same fate, but only by cyanide. Hitler tested the poison on his dog Blondi to make sure it worked. Unluckily for Blondi, but luckily for mankind, the cyanide did the trick. Der Fuhrer was kaput. Our guide Sarah, an Aussie from Gippsland with a Masters degree in European History, has been living in Berlin for eight years. She told us Hitler was medically drug dependent towards the end of the war. So much so he did not trust himself to end his own life with a bullet. He was worried his hands might shake and the shot might cripple but not kill him. This could mean he would be captured alive. This is why he bit down on cyanide first and then shot himself.

The Russians were advancing on Berlin. The Americans were circling. Hitler, a craven coward when it all came down, hid 8m underground under a 4.2m-thick, steel-reinforced concrete roof. The complex measured 30 by 30m. Hitler was there with Eva and Blondi. He’d been there for weeks, hiding, not