A bunker used by Hitler during Germany’s war on the Soviet Union is the focus of a bitter dispute over plans to open a museum.
Officials in the central Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa want to attract tourists to the ruins of the Wehrwolf command centre, a giant complex where the Nazi leader stayed three times during World War Two.
But Communist Party leaders have accused the authorities of creating a magnet for neo-Nazis bent on worshipping the Führer. Visitors would be offered the chance to try on Nazi uniforms and pose for photographs in front of swastika flags, they claimed.
President Viktor Yanukovych has urged the two sides to settle the issue in a local referendum. The museum’s opening in May, timed to coincide with annual Victory Day celebrations, has been delayed.
Hitler’s swimming pool and fragments of concrete are the only visible remains of the Wehrwolf, which he visited between July 1942 and September 1943 to direct the war on the Eastern Front.
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The Germans destroyed most of the site when they retreated in 1944. However, three underground bunkers have remained unexplored since being sealed by the Soviets when they discovered that the entrances had been mined. The complex also had 81 wooden houses above ground and included a sauna, cinema, barber shop and tea house. There is a memorial to 14,000 slave labourers, who included prisoners and local people, slaughtered by the Germans when they abandoned the bunker. War veterans and critics of the museum have picketed the site, which Lydia Zakusylova, the head of the regional Communist Party, claimed had already attracted Nazi sympathisers.
She said: “They wanted to offer tourists the chance to try on uniforms, hang sub-machineguns around their necks and pose for pictures with Nazi flags. This is blatant Nazi propaganda.”
Kateryna Vysotska, an official at the Vinnitsa war museum, said that local collectors had put forward such ideas, which were rejected. She insisted that the aim was only to create a proper memorial to those killed by the Nazis.