Life Inside The Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler’s Paranoid Final Few Days...

The streets of Berlin were devastated beyond recognition in some areas as 33-year-old photographer William Vandivert was led to the location of the former German chancellery buildings. Just days before, these streets had been the subject of a two-week long bloody and bitter battle between the Soviet Union’s Red Army and the last of the German Wehrmacht whose numbers had been propped up by old men and young boys recruited from the city’s population. Now that battle was over and red flags upon which was emblazoned the hammer and sickle emblem of the Soviet Union hung from the ruined buildings, replacing the swastika of the Third Reich which was no more. Vandivert later reported in Life magazine that almost every famous building in the German capital was a shambles and one could walk for blocks and see no living thing, hear nothing but the stillness of death and smell nothing but its putrid stench. Vandivert arrived at what remained of the Reich chancellery and was then guided to an entrance that went down benea