In the restaurant that has risen from the foundations of the old SS barracks you can eat

In the restaurant that has risen from the foundations of the old SS barracks, you can eat “Wolf Ragout” – broth infiltrated by meatballs (beef, not wolf) or tuck into a beetroot/sauerkraut/potato combination that Hitler, a vegetarian, would have favoured. REM’s “Shiny Happy People” wafts insensitively out of a radio shoved into a refurbished corner.Knowing the history of the place, I was shocked to walk in and encounter a room full of uniforms. It turned out to be a prizegiving ceremony for Polish Army reservists. The Nazis’ self-destruction had failed, I reflected; the victors had found a military use for the wreckage of the lair.As with any self-respecting tourist venue, a map marks out the highlights.

From a distance, it seems comfortably similar to the map of facilities at Center Parcs. It reads, though, like a guide to a nightmarish theme park: “12 – Flak Bunker .. 27 – Fuhrer escort battalion barracks … The town and forest were renamed after a local hero, and the site preserved for tourists. At the end of the conflict it regained its identity and lands, including the woods of Gorlitz (the pre-war Prussian name). As further deterrence, 10,000 land-mines were laid; it later took 11 years to clear them.

The best-preserved structure was Goring’s territory, where ladders allow visitors a closer look. Remnants of daily life, such as the echoing tea house, are scattered around a forest whose innocence was brutally violated.Relative to its size, Poland suffered more than any other country in the Second World War. After Soviet troops triumphed at Stalingrad in 1943, the Eastern Front began to shift west. To prevent the USSR making use of the site, the Nazis set about a well-rehearsed programme of blowing up the bunkers. These were covered with vegetation appropriate for the season, to make the lair indistinguishable from the endless forest. The site was never attacked from outside while the Nazis were in residence.The wreckage you witness was administered by the fleeing German military in January 1945, three days before the Red Army arrived. At its height, the Wolf’s Lair was home to more than 2,000 people, many of them detailed to protect the Fuhrer.Elaborate precautions were taken to conceal the lair from prying Allied eyes.

Besides Hitler and his Alsatian dog Blondi, Hermann Goring and Martin Boorman had personal bunkers – as did Ribbentrop, who had connived with the USSR to carve up Poland in 1939. The sole purpose of this conurbation, however, was to direct the Third Reich’s struggle for world domination When all was lost, the destruction turned in on itself. But that was later.In the early Forties, an over-eager estate agent might have pointed to the range of amenities available to new arrivals at the Wolf’s Lair: a subterranean sauna, a cinema and even a casino were created to entertain the warriors between bouts of moving troops along the Eastern Front and consigning Jews to concentration camps and near-certain death.The residents were not the sort of people anyone would have wanted as neighbours. Huge shapes, twisted at vicious angles, conspire to block the pale sun.

In a gentler world – the jungle of central America, say – you would assume you had stumbled upon some lost Mayan city that had fallen victim to an earthquake. On 24 June 1941, soon after the war against the USSR began, the Fuhrer arrived. The Wolf’s Lair moved centre stage in the theatre of war.Today, the sight that awaits you is as startling as it is chilling. In 1940, prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, 3,000 Germans created a Fuhrerhauptquartiere in an East Prussian wilderness. As you wander onwards and eastwards, a single-track railway converges with the road.This line brought Adolf Hitler from Berlin to his lair in the woods. Once, you reflect, this town was known as Rastenburg and echoed with German voices.It takes only a few moments to leave behind the assortment of dwellings strewn around the tired old station.