Hamburg BUNKER

This guide to the Hamburg BUNKER traces the flak tower's construction in the winter of 1942, when close to a thousand forced laborers poured nearly four meters of concrete in under three hundred days to build a machine meant to shoot down bombers, not shelter civilians. It follows the 1943 firestorm that killed tens of thousands of Hamburg residents, the tens of thousands more who crowded into a bunker built for far fewer, and the postwar dilemma of a structure the Allies wanted gone but could not safely destroy. It also hosted, in 1950, Germany's first television broadcast, one more use for a building nobody could erase.