In their book Hitler's Secret Headquarters, Franz Siedler and
Dieter Zeigert give details of 19 Führerhauptquartiere, ranging from W3, near Vendôme in Touraine, to the Bärenhöhle, or Bear's Den, outside Smolensk. Of those either completed or under construction by 1945, the Wolfschanze was the third largest. It was also where Hitler spent more time than in any other place in the war.

We approached it from Ketrzyn (Rastenburg), a town with a Teutonic Knights' castle in one of the most beautiful regions of Poland, the Masurian Lakes. From the car park, a winding path takes you through a wood where vast bunkers rear up like Khmer temples in the Cambodian jungle, except that in this case there are no smiling apsaras, but simply brutal, unadorned ferro-concrete monoliths. The complex included quarters for Hitler, Bormann, Goering, Jodl and Keitel, a stenographers' barracks, a heating plant, a telephone and telex exchange, underground storage, a situation room, an officers' mess, guest accommodation and a railway station.

Today, the bunkers occupied by Hitler and Bormann present at first sight an unblemished face. It is only when you go round them that you see the damage wrought by an attempt at demolition in January 1945 as the Red Army approached. The roofs have been lifted and the walls tilt crazily, like those of a slighted medieval castle. We went into a corridor in Hitler's quarters. It was dark and bitterly cold. At the side, the edifice had been split by dynamiting, forming a mini-gorge, with exposed reinforcing rods, through which we passed. As intended, these buildings were indestructible.

From the Wolfschanze, the Führer directed a theatre of war that stretched from the Atlantic to the Volga and from the Arctic to North Africa. Whether through the rapid thrust of the Panzer divisions or the extermination of Jewry, he held Europe under his evil sway. Yet the impression left by the remains of his East Prussian headquarters is of a man terrified of being killed, crouching half-underground in a cramped, artificially ventilated bunker with walls nearly ten feet thick, in an area plagued in summer by mosquitoes.