National Geographic - Hitlers Hidden City TAG occ

There were three giant Flak towers built to protect the capital and one of them provided shelter for ...There were three giant Flak towers built to protect the capital and one of them provided shelter for 33,000 Berliners at the end of the war.After the incidents that occurred in Russia by the Nazi's, Berliners were so afraid of Soviet retribution that some 100,000 killed themselves instead of face capture.The Allied 24 hour ‘Carpet Bombing’- designed to break Berliners' morale- hit the city as a whole.From 1940 – 1944, Hitler ordered over 1000 bunkers to be built in Berlin.Some of the main public bunkers were almost self-sufficient, with hospitals, electricity generators and water wells inside them.By the end of the war, the conditions in the bunkers were appalling. With three times the planned capacity of people cowering inside, there was barely enough room to stand.Thousands of slave workers were employed to build the giant Flak Towers. The Flak towers were all blown up after the war; those that remained were filled with the rubble from the ones that were destroyed.For the final 'Battle for Berlin,' over a million Russian troops faced a ragtag 'army' of 70,000 Germans. The Nazis secretly constructed their Focke Wulf fighter jets at Berlin’s premier airport.Hitler planned to transform Berlin into a giant city to be called 'Germania.'The main feature of Germania would be the Great Hall – planned to be so big that 17 replicas of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome could fit inside the dome.Hitler, entombed in his Führerbunker, had lost all grasp on reality. Even with the government quarter surrounded by Russians, he felt he could still win the war.Hitler committed suicide along with his doggedly loyal wife Eva Braun once he realized that he could not win the war. His right hand man Goebbels also killed himself, after first giving cyanide to his six young children.With attacks from the Allies in the air, and the Russians on the streets, by the end of the war Berlin was unrecognizable. Nearly everything was destroyed.

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