Fichte-Bunker

The Fichte-Bunker is a nineteenth-century gasometer in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, Germany that was made into an air-raid shelter in World War II and subsequently was used as a shelter for the homeless and for refugees, in particular for those fleeing East Berlin for the West. It is the last remaining brick gasometer in Berlin. The Fichte-Bunker is located between Fichtestraße and Körtestraße in an area of Jugendstil apartment houses, many of which are now under historic protection. The gasometer itself is protected, but in September 2006 the State of Berlin's Real Property Fund sold it to private investors and residences have now been constructed on the roof. The Fichte-Bunker was constructed in 1874 for the Municipal Gasholder Authority to the design of Johann Wilhelm Schwedler. It was the second of four gasometers he designed for Berlin's street lighting; the first was in Friedrichshain and has since been destroyed. Both were topped with the "Schwedler cupola", an engineering innovation of his that used an unsupported curved steel vault to span diameters of up to . The gasometer is a cylinder in diameter, high exclusive of the cupola and high in total. Its form was based on an 1827 design by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for a circular church. The capacity of the telescoping gas container was 30,000 cubic metres. The Kreuzberg gasometer was one of four built to supply gas for street lighting during Berlin's explosive growth in the 1870s. After the introduction of electric street lighting, the gasometer was taken out of service in 1922 and until 1940 stood empty. At the end of 1940, Fritz Todt, Inspector-General of Buildings for the capital, had it converted into a 6-level air-raid shelter, one of three intended primarily for the protection of women and children. (The other two were side by side in Wedding). These were the largest shelters built anywhere in the Reich in the crash programme of shelter construction. The roof, interior walls and floors were constructed of reinforced concrete up to thick.