The Führerbunker and the larger Chancellery complex above ground was the site of fighting in the last days of the war. Additionally, the surviving guards did try to demolish the bunker with gasoline. Although this did not destroy the bunker, neither it nor the Chancellery were intact in 1945. The Führerbunker itself in the postwar period was a site of what would later be termed "dark tourism" in which visitors were drawn to locations associate with the darker elements of human history. A good many Allied soldiers and personnel visited the bunker out of morbid curiosity to see Hitler's last refuge.

This close association with the site and the person of Hitler underlay the Soviets' decision to destroy much of the site in 1948. This was both a symbolic and pragmatic destruction. The Chancellery's salvageable stone was used for Soviet war memorials and some new construction. In light of the dearth of the postwar period and the emerging Cold War, such an amalgamation of the symbolic and pragmatic had real value. Although the destruction of the above-ground Chancellery was accomplished, the Führerbunker was a much harder thing to destroy. Both the Soviet and later GDR demolition efforts only partially destroyed the complex as the ferro-concrete was too sturdy to safely destroy in a metropolitan area. There was some plan to turn the area into an elevated park, but the Berlin Wall rendered these plans irrelevant. The surviving zone was part of the Wall's no-man's land/death strip after 1961, so there was no need to further destroy and develop the site. Other parts of the Chancellery-bunker complex were leveled to become a residential zone for Stasi families.

The GDR completed more of the destruction of the Führerbunker in the 1980s, but it was not until the reunification that the final process of destruction was completed. Exploration of the Wall's dead zone, especially for Roger Water's 1990 concert for Pink Floyd's The Wall, discovered remnants of the complex that were still intact, such as a garage with SS murals. Some voices called for the preservation of these sites, but Berlin's and the German government favored destruction. With the decision to relocate the capital of the new Germany into the reunified Berlin, the dead zone became prime real estate. Preserving the remnants not only kept the possibility of the site becoming a neo-Nazi haunt, and there was a surge of skinheadism in the 1990s, it also meant denying the city space in the heart of the city that would be more profitably used than a memorial.

Turning the question on its head, why should the Germans have preserved the Führerbunker? The site had been stripped of anything of material interest before the destruction of 1948. Moreover, the bunker was in very rough shape already by 1948, with many areas suffering from flooding. The Führerbunker itself was an extemporized design and not really designed to be a permanent structure, less so a museum. Preservation and transformation would have necessitated an outlay of money and resources that would have not been worth the effort.

Not all sites are worthy of historical preservation. The main selling point of the Führerbunker's preservation was largely to slake a morbid desire to see the location of Hitler's end. This type of dark tourism is little concerned with any real engagement with the past. In contrast, sites like the Wannsee House or Dachau at least serve a pedagogic function of connecting these areas with the wider crimes of the Third Reich. Saving the Führerbunker would have been an expensive proposition with no real value for preserving the German past. Hitler's end is in no danger of being forgotten, nor is the Führerbunker itself some great mystery that needs to be explored. The fact that the site where Hitler was immolated is both a parking lot and an area for Berliners to curb their dogs is not only more useful to the present, but also a fitting epitaph for the German dictator's end.