Gory, unseen photos of Hitler, wife’s suicide bunker on display
18 Jan 2013 6:58 AM IST
Some unseen monochrome photographs of the blood spilled bunker, where Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide, are on public display for the first time.
Many of the black and white photos did not make the final cut for the special edition published immediately after the war in 1945, but have been flagged up now in Life.com gallery after a trawl through the magazine's archives.
William Vandivert was the first Western photographer to be granted access into the bunker carved beneath the pompous Reich Chancellery which was reduced to brick-dust by Allied bombs and Russian artillery shells, the 'Daily Mail' reported.
Hitler's Reich, which once stretched from Calais to the shores of the Volga in Russia, and from the Arctic Circle to North Africa, was reduced to a few spartan rooms in a stinking cement submarine where the couple committed suicide on 30 April 1945. ‘These pix were made in the dark with only a candle for illumination ... our small party of four beat all rest of mob who came down about forty minutes after we got there,’ said Vandivert.
One of the pictures shows war correspondents examining the sofa upon which the couple ended their days, and the spreading dark stain of the dictator's blood upon the fabric after he shot himself in the mouth with his service pistol.
Many of the black and white photos did not make the final cut for the special edition published immediately after the war in 1945, but have been flagged up now in Life.com gallery after a trawl through the magazine's archives.
William Vandivert was the first Western photographer to be granted access into the bunker carved beneath the pompous Reich Chancellery which was reduced to brick-dust by Allied bombs and Russian artillery shells, the 'Daily Mail' reported.
Hitler's Reich, which once stretched from Calais to the shores of the Volga in Russia, and from the Arctic Circle to North Africa, was reduced to a few spartan rooms in a stinking cement submarine where the couple committed suicide on 30 April 1945. ‘These pix were made in the dark with only a candle for illumination ... our small party of four beat all rest of mob who came down about forty minutes after we got there,’ said Vandivert.
One of the pictures shows war correspondents examining the sofa upon which the couple ended their days, and the spreading dark stain of the dictator's blood upon the fabric after he shot himself in the mouth with his service pistol.
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