Robert Conrad has been on a mission since 1987 to photograph Adolf Hitler’s bunker in East Berlin. Conrad disguised himself as a construction worker to gain access to the site and managed to make his way inside almost 30 times.

Every second Conrad was on the site of the Führer’s bunker he risked his life. Conrad said:

I walked very slowly across the site, as if on eggshells, so no one would notice me.

And now, 26 years later, he stands with the photographic evidence of Hitler’s infamous bunker. Conrad’s vision was to preserve history before it was demolished. From as early as his teens, Conrad would travel through East Germany photographing historic buildings that the country’s Socialist Unity Party were tearing down to make way for apartment buildings.

In 1986 the remains of the bunker were discovered while government was planning to erect a large apartment complex. The site contained not only Hitler’s bunker, but also an air raid shelter which was used by the New Reich Chancellery and the foreign ministry. All of this rubble needed to be removed in order for the building foundation ot be laid. Conrad said:

Of course there was nothing in the newspapers about the Nazi bunkers. That was very much a taboo subject, as was everything about the Nazi period…Officially, they were just constructing a new residential neighborhood… My seat in the bus was raised, so I could see over the fence into the construction site.

Suddenly I saw this completely insane landscape with enormous concrete ruins that had buried for decades protruding out of the ground.

[Source: Spiegel Online]