Secrets of the forests of V. Germany. Secret citadels: Nazi bunkers that became known only after the war

This bunker was built in Germany in the 60s of the 20th century.
It was supposed to become a shelter for the ruling elite in the event of a nuclear war.
It was located near Bonn and consisted of a system of tunnels with a total length of 17 kilometers.
It took 12 years and 5 billion marks to build.
Fortunately, he was never needed.
In the late 90s it was closed and dismantled. At the moment, only concrete tunnels remain from the bunker.
There is also a museum there, whose workers have restored several rooms.
These photographs were taken at a time when the bunker still existed. I signed them to make it clearer.

Bunker control panel - cameras, electric locks and much more

Federal Chancellor's room. Separate rooms were made only for the chancellor and the president of the country.
The remaining 3,000 people had to live in rooms with bunk beds.

Television studio for recording addresses to the people

Bathroom. This is a luxury room. There were also two of these.

Meeting room

Salon

Dental office

Office of a regular employee

Staff bathroom. There were five of these in the bunker

Vehicles for moving through tunnels.
For short distances, bicycles could be used.

The main door to the 25 ton bunker closed automatically in 15 seconds

800 meter emergency exit tunnel

Entrance to one of five dining rooms. In the evenings they could be used as cinemas.

Steel doors inside the bunker

Another tunnel

A room with spare parts for equipment.

Another tunnel

Another 25 ton front door. There are four in total

Call center in case the telephone connection remains in working order

And another steel door

One of five cuisines

Entrance to one of the five infirmaries for radiation victims

Another Chancellor's Room

Passage to the upper levels

Bunker corridors

Electric car for fast travel

Translator's office near the meeting room.
In total, there were more than 900 offices in the bunker.

Checkpoint at the entrance

Security room at a depth of 100 meters. Cleaners were not allowed to enter there.
This painting was first discovered during the dismantling of the bunker in 1997.

This is what the entrance to the bunker looked like on the surface (model)

And this is what the city looked like standing above the bunker. It's still there, of course.

Wehrmacht bunker in the center of Minsk

Despite the fact that almost 70 years have passed since the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Belarusian land preserves the time stamps of that time. One of them is located in the very center of the Belarusian capital, at the intersection of Kommunisticheskaya and Storozhevskaya streets - right on the embankment of the Svisloch River. Both from Pobediteley Avenue and from the Trinity Suburb, Minsk residents and guests of the capital can clearly see the building of the Moscow-Minsk Bank. But few people know that at its foot sticking out of the ground... are reinforced concrete fragments of one of the largest German buried communications centers that have survived to this day. According to retired Colonel Ivan Zaitsev, who served in the Belarusian Military District, for almost 30 years after the war, part of the 62nd communications center was located in this bunker.

A few words about the hero of this article, without whose story I would not have been able to learn in such detail about such an unusual historical place.

Retired Colonel Ivan Zaitsev is an honorary signalman of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus in the truest sense of the word. Everyone can envy his experience and knowledge, which is apparently why he still, even after resigning, continues to work at the 62nd node.

The Oryol boy was brought to Belarus by army fate. After training, he served in Shchuchin in the aviation unit in a communications company. While still in military service, I decided to become an officer, to graduate from some aviation communications school, fortunately my health allowed it. But the order came to the unit from Gorky, from the tank school. Ivan was used to following orders - he went to Gorky. And I was incredibly surprised when I learned that there was also a communications school in this city...

After graduating from the Gorky Military School of Communications Technicians, he was sent to Belarus, to the 62nd communications center, where he went through all the steps of the career ladder - from a young, beardless technician to a chief. It was there that he was awarded the Order of the Red Star - for installing new equipment at the site and for organizing the ZAS service.

I still remember that team with warmth, we had a special atmosphere,” says Ivan Ilyich. - And part of the elements of the 62nd was a former German underground bunker from the Great Patriotic War. At that time, the troops were receiving new sets of ZAS, there was a lot of work. After all, the node was used at the command level. Large-scale exercises were often held, and all communication with the countries of the Warsaw Pact Organization went through us. At the same time, the headquarters of the communications center was located at the headquarters of the Belarusian Military District, and in the bunker there was part of the radio equipment and even at first two transmitters - a kind of mini-radio center.

The appearance of a German bunker in the area of the Tatar vegetable gardens of Minsk is shrouded in mystery. It is only known that its construction was started by the Nazis immediately after the occupation of the Belarusian capital in 1941. Then it was the outskirts of the city. The protected bunker was designed by the Germans and built by Soviet prisoners of war. Hitler’s troops were rushing to Moscow, so through this node the Army Headquarters “Center” immediately established contact with headquarters in Vinnitsa.

According to Ivan Zaitsev, the bunker was equipped with the latest Siemens automatic telephone exchange at that time, including some equipment for maritime communication centers, which were used by Soviet signalmen for their own purposes for almost thirty years after the end of the war. High-capacity cables went to the German garrison in Masyukovshchina, to German institutions that were located in the area of now Belinsky and Karl Marx streets. After the war in the 1950s, the Minsk Suvorov Military School and later the headquarters of the Belarusian Military District were powered from the bunker with a separate cable. Communication lines from the headquarters of the BVO and the house of the commander of the district troops, military units and formations, military hotels and other military institutions also converged here.

The bunker itself was a one-story underground room with three entrances. Ivan Ilyich drew such a plan from memory. In the center there is a long and wide corridor. In some rooms there were transmitters with receivers, long-distance communication equipment, in others there were cabinets with telephone sets and boxes with cable entries. The rooms are 20 square meters each. The unit could be powered autonomously with electricity - from German diesel power plants located there.

There was a very interesting ventilation system,” says Ivan Ilyich. - There was no heating in the bunker at all, although both in winter and summer the ventilation exhaust pipes constantly maintained a temperature of approximately plus 18 degrees Celsius. There were no radiators, it always seemed cool. True, there was a lot of moisture, so German equipment boxes and cabinets for storing communications equipment were equipped with rubber seals.

There is one unusual story connected with this place in the official biography of retired colonel Ivan Zaitsev. Minsk at that time was an intermediate city for flights of military and military aircraft of the USSR to the countries of the Warsaw Treaty Organization. They often landed at the Machulishchi airfield, where the 121st Guards Heavy Bomber and 201st Air Defense Fighter Aviation Regiments were stationed.

As retired Colonel Ivan Zaitsev recalls, in early December 1972 it became known that negotiations between the leaders of the USSR and France - Leonid Brezhnev and Georges Pompidou - would be held in Minsk, or rather, in the new residence of the Secretary General near Zaslavl. The military began hastily preparing for the arrival of high-ranking guests: all dilapidated buildings at the airfield were demolished, the garrison territory and the road to Minsk were renovated. The 404th relay station was installed near the bunker, which provided instant communication with Pyotr Masherov's dacha. Through the cables of the communication center located in the bunker, foreign television journalists sent programs to their countries.

On January 11, 1973, Brezhnev arrived in Minsk from Moscow by train, Georges Pompidou with those accompanying him and journalists arrived in two Caravel planes from France. The weather then worsened: it snowed during the day and froze at night. Therefore, it was decided to use heat engines on the runway around the clock. Not trusting the regimental guard, by order of the commander of the BVI troops, an officer guard was formed to guard two French aircraft. But this did not save us from the emergency.

At night, the “conscript” driver of a vehicle from the OBATO fighter regiment fell asleep while clearing a strip right behind the wheel and ran into the “Caravelle,” says Ivan Ilyich. - Today we can talk about this political incident with a grin. And then it was a national emergency. It turned out that the soldier had been driving continuously for two days and had hardly slept during this time. As a result, he was not only released from arrest, but also placed in the infirmary of the garrison medical unit for a week under the supervision of doctors. And the entire command, from the battalion to the head of the military department of the KGB of the BVI, was demoted.

The early 1980s were politically turbulent. In response to the deployment of NATO strategic forces, it was decided to erect a “defense shield” on the western borders of the USSR. From the node, underground cables were laid to the lines of the Ministry of Communications, and a connection was made to the state network. It was assumed that in the event of the outbreak of hostilities at the site, the 7th Signal Brigade of the Supreme High Command, stationed in Gomel, should come to this place. The area around the bunker allowed military signalmen to deploy both equipment and tents.

However, after just a couple of years, the life of the bunker came to a standstill. The city expanded close to its walls. It was decided to install new military communications equipment in a different place...

I remember that next to the bunker there was a barracks in which workers of the communications center previously lived,” recalls retired colonel Ivan Zaitsev. - And then it was demolished and the Belarus Hotel was built in this place. In recent years, on the eve of the collapse of the USSR, the bunker was used as a warehouse for storing communications property.

Today, the German bunker can still be seen in photographs of the open joint-stock company "Bank Moscow-Minsk" - its parking lot is located above the premises of the former communications center. Not far from the central façade entrance stands one of the exhaust pipes. All three entrances to the bunker are sealed with metal doors, access is closed. He is waiting for a new owner...

From the editor

In general, in 1941 - 1942. Wehrmacht sappers built a whole network of bunkers and pillboxes in Minsk, which were supposed to control the main highways of the city. This concrete chain began in the area of Chelyuskintsev Park, keeping under control a giant stalag where tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were kept and the strategic Minsk-Moscow highway, the main supply route for Army Group Center, passed through. The bunker has survived to this day in the courtyards of houses along Independence Avenue in the area of the Gabrovo restaurant. The next bunker with machine gun nests and a crew room is located nearby: it also controlled a strategic highway, and you can see it in the courtyard of an antique store known to Minsk residents. Other links in the chain of Wehrmacht casemates have not survived to this day, although old-timers remember them in the Komarovka area and the current Victory Square. A unique round bunker, topped with an armored cap and invulnerable to air bombs of that period, remains a landmark of Minsk. Judging by its location, it was part of the system of Wehrmacht security bunkers crossing Minsk from east to southwest, but it belonged to the SS. This monster, which was then located on the territory of the Minsk ghetto, was supposed to stop all encroachments from within and without, and its large-caliber machine guns also held at gunpoint the road leading to the prisoner-of-war camps in Drozdy and Masyukovshchina. You can still see the bunker near the Planet Hotel.

There were undoubtedly other bunkers, but they were mostly razed to the ground in the 1940s. If our readers have any information about these ominous artifacts from the times of war and occupation, we will be happy to publish their information.

Today's story will be about one of the largest bunkers of the German defensive line "West Wall", built in 1938-1940 on the western borders of the Third Reich.

A total of 32 objects of this type were built, which were built to protect strategically important points and roads. Only two such bunkers have survived to this day, of which only one B-Werk has reached our time intact. The second bunker was blown up in 1947 and covered with soil. Only decades later, a group of volunteers took on the task of restoring the blown up bunker with the aim of creating a museum inside. Volunteers did a huge amount of work to restore the bunker and today it is available for visiting to anyone interested in military history.

B-Werk Katzenkopf is located on the top of the mountain of the same name, located near the village of Irrel, a couple of kilometers from the border with Luxembourg. The facility was built in 1937-1939 with the aim of controlling the Cologne-Luxembourg highway. For this purpose, two B-Werks were built on Mount Katzenkopf, located close to each other. The second B-Werk Nimsberg, like B-Werk Katzenkopf, was blown up in the post-war period and destroyed to such an extent that it could not be restored, in differences from its brother.

01. View from Mount Katzenkopf to the village of Irrel.

B-Werk Katzenkopf was destroyed in 1947 by the French as part of the agreement on the demilitarization of Germany and remained in a state of ruins, covered with earth, for thirty years, until in 1976 it turned out that the explosion destroyed only the upper level of the structure, and the rest of the underground part was not damaged. After this, the volunteer fire brigade of the village of Irrel took over the excavation of the site, through whose efforts the B-Werk was restored and since 1979 has become available to visitors as a museum.

02. The photo shows the preserved part of the ground level with one of the two entrances inside, not damaged by the explosion, but changed during the reconstruction process.

All B-Werkes were built according to the same standard design, but could differ in details and interior layout. The name B-Werk comes from the classification of bunkers of the Third Reich, in which objects were assigned a letter according to the thickness of the walls. Class B corresponded to objects with a wall and ceiling thickness of 1.5 meters. In order not to give the enemy information about the thickness of the walls of the structures, these objects were then called Panzerwerk (literally: armored structure). This object was officially called Panzerwerk Nr.1520.

Before the explosion, the above-ground level of Panzerwerk Nr.1520 had the following appearance. I marked the part of the upper level destroyed by the explosion as dark.

03. The preserved wall of the left flank with one of the emergency exits. A dummy armored machine gun turret is visible on the roof. Before the explosion, the facility's armored turrets were dismantled.

04. To give the object a shape close to the original, volunteers built dummies of both machine-gun armored turrets from brick and concrete. Now the roof of Panzerwerk Nr.1520 looks like this:

Each Panzerwerk had a standard set of weapons and armored domes, which I have indicated in this diagram. During this photo walk I will tell you more about them. To date, the only Panzerwerk with surviving armored domes is the B-Werk Bessering.

05. On the rubble of the destroyed part of the facility, a wooden cross and a memorial plaque were installed in memory of the fallen soldiers of the 39th Fusilier Infantry Regiment (Füssilier-Regiments), who fought from 1941 to 1944 on the territory of the USSR. The soldiers of one of the battalions of this regiment formed the garrison of Panzerwerk Nr.1520 in 1939-1940.

06. In front of the entrance to the Panzerwerk there is a small park with numerous benches and an excellent view of the village of Irrel.

07. The entrance to the building in the original was a hatch about a meter high, but now in its place there is an ordinary entrance door of standard height, so that when going inside, you don’t even have to bend down. An embrasure is traditionally located opposite the entrance. The design of this part underwent significant changes during the restoration of the blown up bunker. Initially, the floor was much lower and the embrasure was located at the chest level of the person entering.

08. Around the bend in the entrance corridor there was a hole 4.6 meters deep and 1.5 meters wide. In peacetime, the pit was covered with a steel sheet 2 cm thick, forming a kind of bridge.

09. In a combat position, the steel bridge rose and acted as an armored shield, for which an embrasure was built into it. Such a system made it almost impossible for the enemy to penetrate inside the facility. The photo shows a hole in front of the second entrance, located in the destroyed part of the structure.

The diagram shows the structure of a similar system in B-Werk class buildings of the Western Wall. Each such object had two entrances, behind which there were pits covered with armor plate. Both entrances led to a common vestibule, which was also shot through another embrasure.

For clarity, I will give a plan of the upper floor. The holes at the entrance hatches are marked with the number 22, the general vestibule is 16. I marked in gray the rooms destroyed by the explosion, among which: the guard casemate (17), the filter and ventilation casemate (19), the grenade launcher armored dome shaft (21), the casemate flanking the entrances to the bunker (23) and a number of utility and technical premises.

Premises that have survived to one degree or another: a machine-gun armored dome (1), an observation casemate with an armored observation dome (3), a command center (4), a communications point (5), an artillery armored observation dome (6), a flamethrower casemate (11), a staircase to lower level (12) as well as several technical rooms and personnel rooms.

10. Now let's look at the preserved part (more precisely, the partially preserved part) of the upper level of the bunker. In the center of the photo you can see a room closed with a screen door.

11. Behind the net there is a heavily damaged flamethrower casemate and part of the flamethrower barrel. The jar contains the original flammable mixture for the flamethrower.

The fortress flamethrower was intended to protect the roof of the facility in the event of enemy soldiers penetrating it, as well as for the close defense of the bunker. The control of the flamethrower was completely electric, but in the event of a power failure, a manual option was also provided. At one time, the flamethrower ejected 120 liters of a fiery mixture, spraying it through a special nozzle and turning hundreds of cubic meters of space in a given direction into fiery Gehenna. Then he needed a two-minute pause to charge the new mixture. The fuel reserves were enough for 20 charges and the range of the flamethrower was 60-80 meters. The installation was located on two levels, its diagram is shown in the figure:

13. All armored turrets, containing tens of tons of metal, were removed from the site in the post-war period before the bunker was blown up. Today, in their place are brick and concrete dummies.

Six-recessed towers of type 20Р7 were developed by the German concern Krupp and are made of high-strength steel. One such tower cost 82,000 Reichsmarks (about 420,000 euros today). You can imagine how much the construction of the Siegfried Line cost, because there were 32 such objects and each had two towers. The turret's crew consisted of five people: a commander and four gunners. The commander observed the situation around him from a periscope installed on the roof of the tower and commanded fire. Two MG34 machine guns were placed inside the turret, which could be freely rearranged from one embrasure to another, but could not occupy two adjacent embrasures at the same time. There should always be a minimum gap between them - one embrasure. The thickness of the turret armor was 255 mm. Towers of this type were also used on the East Wall and the Atlantic Wall, two major defensive lines of the Third Reich, more than 800 of them were produced in total.

In the destroyed part of the bunker there was another armored dome for the 50-mm M 19 fortress mortar, whose task was the close defense of the Panzerwerk. The range of the mortar was 20-600 meters with a rate of fire of 120 rounds per minute. The diagram of the mortar armored dome is shown in the figure.

14. In the picture you can see numerous consequences of the 1947 explosion, in particular the lopsided ceiling that fell into the bunker.

15. The personnel accommodation room is the only fully restored room in the bunker.

16. The facility was equipped with a forced ventilation system in which air was forced inside by air pumps, if necessary passing through the FVA. Thus, excess pressure was maintained inside the bunker, which prevented poisonous gases from penetrating inside. In case of power loss in the network, manually operated reserve fuel units were placed in many places inside the bunker, one of which you see in the photo.

17. Stairs to the lower level, behind which the destroyed part of the bunker is visible. To the left of the corridor are the command center and communications rooms.

18. The command center premises were not damaged by the explosion, but the inside is still empty.

19. From the command center you can get into the observation casemate, which was once equipped with a cone-shaped observation armored cap of the Type 90P9 type.

The armor thickness of this small armored dome was 120 mm. The dome had five slits for all-round observation and two optical instruments. This is what the observer's position looked like before the bunker exploded:

20. This is how it looks now.

21. At the end of the corridor there is another room in which the personnel were located. This room is located near the destroyed part of the bunker and was also damaged by the explosion.

22. Adjacent to the room is the lower level of the 21P7 type artillery observation armored tower, which was designed to accommodate artillery observers with optical rangefinders. Thus, the bunker could also be used for aiming and adjusting artillery fire. Unlike the machine gun turret, the 21Р7 turret did not have embrasures, only holes for observation devices and a periscope. By the presence of this turret, the B-Werk Katzenkopf differed from the standard design, according to which a similar structure was equipped with two identical six-embrasure machine gun turrets. This panzerwerk also had two machine-gun turrets, but the second one was located remotely and was connected to the underground tunnel bunker.

23. Absolutely nothing has survived from the artillery observation tower to this day.

24. The remaining rooms on the upper level were destroyed by the explosion. We go down to the lower level.

25. The lower level should be more interesting, since it was not damaged by the explosion.

At the lower level of the structure there were: ammunition depots (24, 25, 40), a kitchen (27) with a food warehouse (28), barracks for personnel equipped with emergency exits to the surface (29, 31), a lower level of a flamethrower installation (32) , staircase leading to the tern system (33), fuel storage for diesel generators (34), toilets (36) and shower (37), infirmary (38), engine room with two diesel generator sets (39) and a reservoir with a reserve water (41).

Let's see now what's left of all this.

26. In the corridor (35) there is a ladder leading to one of the rooms on the upper level.

27. The infirmary room was slightly damaged by the explosion.

28. At the end of the corridor there was one of the ammunition storage warehouses, across the wall from which there was an engine room with two diesel generator sets.

29. The bunker received electricity from an external network; diesel generators served only as a backup source of electricity in the event of a loss of voltage in the power cable. The power of each of the two four-cylinder diesel engines was 38 hp. In addition to lighting, electricity was needed for electric drives of the ventilation system, heating resistors, which was electric (and was supplemented by ordinary potbelly stoves). The kitchen equipment was also completely electric.

30. The diesel generator room also contains traces of an explosion. Almost nothing has survived from the equipment.

31. Ammunition depot.

32. Remains of the shower room.

33. Toilets.

34. Sewage equipment.

35. In this room (34) a supply of fuel for diesel engines was stored in the amount of 17,000 liters, with the expectation of a monthly autonomy.

36. We move to the second corridor (30) of the underground level.

37. Traces of destruction from the explosion are also visible here. The transition to the upper level through a ladder ladder is bricked up here

38. One of two rooms on the underground level, which housed beds for resting personnel (29). In the corner of the room there are two original filters from the facility’s filter and ventilation installation. In total, the bunker had six such filters in case of a gas attack. Behind the grated door is an emergency exit to the surface. It was originally of a completely different design, but as part of the bunker's restoration as a museum, it was remodeled to meet modern safety standards. It is also visible from the outside in photo 03.

39. The former ammunition depot houses modest displays to compensate for the emptiness that reigns around.

40. Information stands tell about the events of 75 years ago.

41. A kitchen room, only the sink remains of its equipment. Adjacent to the kitchen is a warehouse for storing food.

42. The second of two rooms for rest of personnel. Each room had eighteen beds in which the soldiers slept in shifts. In total, the bunker garrison numbered 84 people. Beds like the one in this picture were typical of all siegfried line bunkers from the smallest to the B-Werke.

43. This room also contains one of the emergency exits to the surface. It had a design that made it impossible to penetrate into the object from the surface. The D-shaped emergency exit shaft leading to the roof of the bunker with a ladder ladder inside was covered with sand. If there was a need to leave the bunker through the emergency exit, the wedges blocking the valves inside the barrel were pulled out and the sand poured out into the bunker, freeing the exit to the top. Approximately the same emergency exit design was used at Fort Schonenburg on the Maginot Line, only there was gravel instead of sand and it spilled not into the fort, but into a cavity inside the trunk.

This completes the inspection of the lower level. Everything that I have described up to this point was typical for all 32 Panzerwerke built, the differences were only in the details. But B-Werk Katzenkopf had an interesting feature that significantly distinguished it from the standard project, namely an additional third level, located deeper than the main structure.

The diagram below clearly shows the structure of the bunker and the lower underground level, located at a depth of twenty-five meters (the diagram is not to scale).

44. A ladder like this leads down.

45. This is perhaps the most interesting part of the bunker and the largest. There are no such open spaces anywhere else inside the facility.

46. Initially, it was planned to connect this panzerwerk with the Nimsberg panzerwerk, located a kilometer away. Plans called for an electric narrow-gauge railway to be laid between both structures. Thus, both panzerwerks could form something similar to the forts of the Maginot Line or the objects of the Eastern Wall. But in 1940, Germany captured France, Belgium and Luxembourg and the need for the Western Wall disappeared, all construction work on the defensive line was stopped, including the construction of this postern.

47. Two posterns diverge to the side of the staircase, located at right angles to each other. The larger one was supposed to connect both panzerwerks. The smaller one leads to the combat block, located away from the main structure and consisting of a machine gun turret and an emergency exit.

Layout of the underground bunker level:

48. First, I headed along the smaller one. Its length is 75 meters.

49. The turn ends with a guard casemate covering the approach to the combat block. There is no armored door, as are all armored doors at the facility.

50. Inside the guard casemate there is an embrasure from which the tunnel was shot through and a device for manual ventilation of the casemate in the event of failure or stoppage of the bunker's electrical ventilation system.

51. This is what the apparatus for manual ventilation of a casemate looks like. Similar devices were installed at all important points in the bunker.

52. There is also a staircase leading to the combat block.

53. Climbing the stairs we find ourselves on the lower level. There is an emergency exit portal in the wall, which has a design typical for such objects. Through a hole in the ceiling, access was made to the machine-gun armored turret. This tower was a standard six-ambrasure type 20Р7, exactly the same as that installed in the main building. On the wall you can see fastenings for three beds - the tower crew was located in this room.

54. The tower itself was dismantled, like the rest of the armored domes of the facility, immediately after the end of the war. Now a concrete dummy has also been built here.

Here's what it looked like in the original:

55. There’s nothing more to see here, let’s go back to the fork.

56. Along the way there is such an opening in the blind. Apparently, the plans were to replenish the facility with another warhead, or one of the small bunkers located on this mountain was to be connected to the system. There is no way to know now.

57. Beautiful.

58. The ceiling height of the main postern is 3.5 meters. After the cramped interior of the Panzerwerk, this underground location seems simply huge.

59. Inside the unfinished main postern there is an exhibition of various World War II bombs and shells found in the region. There are information plaques on the wall telling the history of the site and the Siegfried Line as a whole.

60. Here in the wall there is another opening (on the left in the photo) similar to what we saw in the neighboring postern. But unlike the opening that is located in the turn leading to the armored turret, the purpose of this one is known. Fifty meters below the bunker there is a railway tunnel. At the time when they began to build this postern to unite both panzerwerks, there were plans to connect the underground system of passages with the railway tunnel that is located under the bunker. In this way, it was possible to transport ammunition and other ammunition to both bunkers completely unnoticed by rail. These plans were not destined to come true for the reasons described above.

61. At the end of the terna there is a small water supply casemate. Inside there is a well, 120 meters deep, and a powerful electric pump that pumps water from the well into the bunker’s water supply.

62. In the place where the postern breaks off, a small diorama has been built, which is not related to the bunker.

63. The bunker water supply pump has been preserved in relatively good condition.

64. The remains of some electrical equipment hang on the wall.

65. The inspection of the facility has come to an end and we are heading to the exit.

Finally, a few words about the history of this building. Combat duty at the facility began in August 1939 and lasted until May 1940, when France was captured. Service at the facility lasted from four to six weeks, after which the garrison went on rotation. After the capture of France, combat duty in the bunker was canceled, the facility was completely disarmed, and in order to maintain the technical systems in good working order, only one soldier was left in it to look after the facility.

In December 1944, an order was received to prepare the bunker for battle and move a garrison into it. But due to an acute shortage of people, it was possible to gather only 7 Wehrmacht soldiers and 45 people from the Hitler Youth, aged 14-16 years. In January, American troops approached the village of Irrel and began heavy shelling of the village and surrounding area, which continued for several weeks. In February, the Americans set to work on both panzerwerks, inflicting numerous air and artillery strikes on the targets. The demoralized garrison of the Panzerwerk left the facility at night through the emergency exit and the Americans who went inside found absolutely no one there, after which they blew up the entrances to the bunker so that no one could use it, and in 1947, as part of the demilitarization of Germany, all the metal was removed from the bunker and the bunker itself The bunker was blown up and covered with soil. It remained in this state for about thirty years, until in 1976 the local volunteer fire brigade took on its restoration and did a Herculean job to make the object accessible to visitors.

The noise around Hitler's "golden train", in which the Nazis allegedly hid the looted treasures of the "Third Reich" underground in Poland, has not yet subsided, and the German media are already reporting on a new possible sensation. This time we are talking about underground adits discovered in the vicinity of the Brandenburg village of Genshagen, south of Berlin. During World War II, one of the Daimler-Benz factories was located here, which produced, however, not cars, but engines for military aircraft - mainly for Messerschmitt 109 and 110 fighters.

An underground bomb shelter for workers was built nearby. For some reason, underground work took a surprisingly long time, and construction did not stop until the very end of the war, when there was an acute shortage of cement, bricks, steel and other building materials even for direct military needs. Another oddity: according to local residents, the entrance to the adits was guarded by SS soldiers, even as if from the elite Death's Head division. Conventional bomb shelters had nothing like this.

Why did they blow up the entrances to the bunker?

A few days before the surrender of Nazi Germany, in April 1945, the surrounding area was rocked by several powerful explosions. The Red Army was very close, but it had nothing to do with the explosions. The SS blew up all five entrances to the bunker. The underground tunnel was so blocked that these entrances were discovered only seven decades later!

Context

This was possible thanks to the efforts of historian Rainer Karlsch. His attention was attracted not only by these facts, but also by the fact that the underground bunker was not shown on any maps of that time. Even in the well-preserved archives of the Daimler concern, he did not appear. True, they knew about its existence from local residents, and twice, in the fifties and eighties, they tried to find it. They dug in different places, including with the help of excavators, but to no avail.

It took Karlsch two years and the help of another enthusiast, vice-burgomaster of the district center Torsten Klaehn, to first discover the ventilation shaft, and then gradually explore the adits themselves - more precisely, so far only 6 kilometers of an extensive system of tunnels, stretching presumably for several dozen kilometers.

What did you find underground?

It turned out that we are not talking about a large vaulted hall (this is how underground bomb shelters were usually built), but about adits diverging in different directions, approximately 2 m 30 cm high and one and a half meters wide. They were dug at a depth of 15 meters, reinforced with solid concrete blocks connected to each other. The construction was clearly not completed: the researchers discovered stacks of bricks, facing tiles, and so on stretching for several tens of meters.

There's nothing more interesting, really. Rusted metal cabinets, half-rotten wooden furniture, ancient medical equipment, steel doors bent from explosions - that's all. No hidden treasures, no secret files of the "Third Reich", no plans for the first jet fighter Messerschmitt 262, which was assembled at the Genshagen plant at the end of the war...

This doesn't bother Rainer Karlsch at all. He reminds again and again that only a small part of the underground adits has been explored. And he draws attention to the fact that just 15 kilometers from the bunker, next to the personal estate of the Minister of Post of the “Third Reich” Hakeburg, there was a scientific laboratory of the ministry. It sounds almost anecdotal, but the fact is that the Reich Postal Minister was Hitler's old comrade in the Nazi party, holder of the NSDAP "golden sign" Wilhelm Ohnesorge. His department conducted very important research. According to Spiegel magazine, under the leadership of Ohnesorge, in particular, remote-controlled surface-to-air missiles were created. In addition, its scientists worked on the creation of nuclear weapons.

Eyewitnesses talk about trucks that allegedly transported some heavy cargo from Hackeburg to Genshagen in April 1945. What were they carrying? Blueprints for “weapons of retribution”? Secret files of the "Third Reich"? Nazi gold? You can assume anything. By the way, Ohnesorge, who died in Munich in 1962 and never spent a day in prison (although all his property was confiscated after the war), never spoke about the underground bunker, or about any treasures or secret documents. This can also be interpreted in any way you like.

See also:

Warehouse No. 12

This secret warehouse was the largest bunker in East Germany. Up to 20 thousand tons of ammunition, shells, uniforms, as well as diesel fuel, anti-aircraft guns, camp kitchens, bakeries, and other equipment and machinery in case of war for the armies of the GDR and its allies under the Warsaw Pact were stored here. To transport everything at once would require 500 railroad cars.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

underground plant

The warehouse was located near the German-German border near Halberstadt. For the construction of the bunker in 1979-1983, they used adits cut by prisoners during the “Third Reich”, when the production of Junkers aircraft from Dessau was going to be transferred here. On the territory of the concentration camp, a few kilometers from the underground complex, there is now a memorial complex.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

Disarmament

After German reunification, the Bundeswehr used the warehouse, but in 1994 the garrison was disbanded and the bunker was sold to a private investor, who never figured out how to use it. The complex suffered greatly from vandals and metal thieves, for whom the gates, bars and locks did not become a hindrance. With the permission of the owner, excursions are sometimes conducted into the bunker.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

Dark, cold and dry

Pitch darkness, everything is without power. Light comes only from flashlights. Dry and cold, 12 degrees. There is a thin layer of soot everywhere. Several years ago, there was a fire underground, which apparently arose due to careless handling of the autogen with which the thieves were cutting metal. At one time, 250 military personnel served in the bunker. Now it is practically unguarded.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

"Dolphin"

The warehouse began to be filled in 1983. The arrangement cost 190 million GDR marks. It was part of the Dolphin program, which planned to build nearly seventy nuclear shelters in East Germany for government, military, and civil defense purposes. The total cost of the program exceeded two billion Eastern marks.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

Dismantling

What happened to the complex over several decades from the spring of 1945 until the opening of the warehouse? Halberstadt was located in the Soviet occupation zone. The equipment that had been installed underground for aviation production was taken to the USSR. After this, they decided to blow up the adits, during the construction of which thousands of prisoners of a specially created concentration camp were killed.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

Preparing to blow up

Preparations for the explosion began in 1949. Soviet miners managed to plant more than 90 tons of explosives, but to completely destroy them they needed nine times more. With such a powerful explosion, a crater would form in place of the mountain. The new German authorities turned to the Soviet command with an urgent request to abandon the plan with such consequences.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

After the war

Instead of blowing up, the Germans proposed to fill everything up, but as a result they agreed to blow up the tunnels at the entrances. Around the same time, a memorial complex was opened nearby on the territory of the former Malachite concentration camp (Langenstein-Zwieberge). Now in one of the adits leading to the underground bunker, an exposition of his documentation center is equipped.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

Eyewitnesses

According to local residents, the remaining accessible part of the underground complex was used for some time by units of the Soviet Army. One excursion participant recalls how in 1959, as a boy, he and his friends crawled into a restricted area, where they came across Soviet tanks in a dark tunnel.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

In case of nuclear war

In the 1960s, the GDR authorities remembered the existence of the complex and began to consider options for its use for the benefit of the national economy. In particular, it was planned to place a cold storage plant in the tunnels, but with the aggravation of the Cold War, the facility acquired strategic importance, since on both sides of the German-German border they began to actively build underground shelters in the event of a nuclear war.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

Seventeen kilometers

"Warehouse complex number 12" (Komplexlager KL-12) of the National People's Army of the GDR was put into operation for the May holidays of 1984. The total length of the tunnels, including new ones, was about 17 kilometers. Half of the old tunnels that could not be restored were walled up.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

underground city

The scale is amazing. Trains stopped underground to unload. In one of the tunnels, a 500-meter platform was equipped for this purpose. From there, cargo was transported to storage compartments. The total storage area was almost 40 thousand square meters, and the volume of underground space was 220 thousand cubic meters.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

At the combat post

“I prefer to show the bunker by car, you can see more. You quickly get tired of walking on concrete,” says the former commandant of the complex, Hans-Joachim Büttner. The retired lieutenant colonel served here from the first to the last day. He started in the GDR and ended up as a Bundeswehr officer.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

Questions for the commandant

This is what the bunker looked like in 1993. The former commandant patiently answers the group's questions. They ask about the Soviet SS-20 nuclear missiles? “We definitely didn’t,” he says, smiling. Did you know who cut down the old tunnels? "Yes. Everyone who served here has been to the memorial complex at least once." Where was the money? ...

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

One hundred billion

The bunker played a role in one of the final acts of the history of the GDR. After the exchange of Eastern marks, all the cash currency of East Germany withdrawn from circulation was brought here - 620 million banknotes per 100 billion with a total weight of three thousand tons, as well as savings books and checks. They decided to bury the money by mixing it with rock in the hope that it would rot over time. The entrance was securely walled up.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

Money graveyard

The location was kept secret, but a few years later strange-smelling East German banknotes began appearing at numismatic auctions. Among them were banknotes of 200 and 500 marks, which were not put into circulation at all. Someone climbed into the bunker and punched a hole in a multi-meter layer of concrete. It turned out that in a dry and cold bunker, socialist stamps did not rot, did not decompose, did not deteriorate.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

Irony of fate

Several treasure hunters were caught and sentenced to suspended sentences. In order to stop the amateur extraction of priceless money, in 2002 they decided to remove it from the bunker and destroy it in a garbage incineration factory along with household waste. Ironically, the Eastern brand, so to speak, outlived the Western brand. By this point, the Germans were already using the euro.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

Bunker in a bunker

Inside the storage bunker there was another one - for personnel. It had more serious protection and had all life support systems. After a nuclear attack, this bunker-in-a-bunker could operate autonomously for 30 days. In the event of a military conflict, the shipment of ammunition here could begin within 70 minutes after receiving the order.

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

What to do?

A private owner wanted to use the bunker to store mining waste. The business is profitable, but the authorities have revoked the permit already issued. The bunker hung, as they say, as a dead weight. Plans to set up an underground disco here were seriously considered, but they were abandoned. Dancing in the adits, the construction of which claimed the lives of several thousand concentration camp prisoners?

Secret bunker near Halberstadt

P.S.

We talked about the memorial complex on the site of the former Langenstein-Zwieberg concentration camp in a separate report. An interview with retired Lieutenant Colonel Hans-Joachim Büttner can be read at the link at the end of the page.

Berlin. April 1945. Red Army troops are on the outskirts of Berlin, and there are only a few weeks left until the end of the war.
The Wehrmacht command these days is going deeper and deeper underground - into pre-built bunkers, where German generals, together with Adolf Hitler, sitting behind thick concrete walls, give the last orders to the troops...
Map of surrounded Berlin; last award order; an ashtray full of cigarette butts; empty bottles of alcohol and a Luger on the table of the polished Major General of the Wehrmacht...
Who knows what his last days were like...

These days, the installation “In the Lair of the Fascist Beast” has opened at the Sheremetyev Museum in the Mikhailovskaya Battery in Sevastopol. The installation recreates the workplace of a German general in one of the Berlin bunkers in the spring of 1945.
The installation uses both authentic objects of that time and very accurate copies of some exhibits, which, due to their dilapidation, cannot be placed in an open exhibition.

3. Bunkers like this one have been built at depths of up to 40 meters throughout Berlin since 1935. The walls were erected from 1.6 to 4 meters thick, and the floors from 2 to 4.5 meters. Ceiling heights ranged from 2 to 3 meters in different rooms. The outer corners of the bunkers were made beveled to disperse the shock wave.
The bunkers were built hermetically sealed and provided complete protection against the penetration of poisonous gases. Taking into account the possible disabling of nearby power plants and the destruction of the city power grid, the bunkers were equipped with autonomous diesel generators. A heating system, as a rule, was not provided. Normal temperature could only be ensured by heating the air supplied to the ventilation system.

4. When creating the installation, Hitler’s bunker was taken as a basis. It was from it that the main points were copied - walls, equipment on the walls (ventilation shafts, phosphorus strip intended for orientation in rooms in the absence of lighting). A Wehrmacht major general works here, occupying a certain position at headquarters.

5. Judging by the stripes and awards, this person is associated with the National Socialist Party of Germany and has services to the Reich. The red ribbon on the right breast pocket means that the general is a Knight of the Order of the Blood, a highly honorable award in the Nazi hierarchy. It was given for participation in the famous Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, from which Hitler’s path to power actually began. This award was given to quite a few people, and it shows that the general is one of the Fuhrer’s long-time associates. However, there is no party badge on his uniform, which means that this person never joined the party. Apparently, this is why his position is quite modest, as for a longtime ally, just a major general (the first general rank in the Wehrmacht)

6. Order bar, 2nd class cross and medal for wounds. Such a “gold” medal was given for a serious wound or for 5 minor ones. Because The award has a swastika, which means it was received during World War II.

7. On the table we see a number of objects that were with the general in his last days. On the right side of the table is a photograph of the eldest son, a submariner, and just below, under the pistol, is a postcard from the youngest son, which came from the front. Directly in front of the general is the paper he is working with. This is an award sheet for Eugene Valot. Eugene Valot was the last person to be awarded the Knight's Cross, Germany's highest honor, during the war. The documents are ready, all that remains is to sign. And the date is April 29, 1945.

8. Another award sheet is being punched out in the typewriter, but the award, apparently, never reached the soldier or officer..

9. German typewriter "Ideal". It’s interesting that on the number “5”, instead of the % icon we are used to today, there is an SS icon

10. A soldier’s book on the general’s desk

11. An interesting set of items on the general’s desk - citron candies, a pack of cotton wool, a lighter, a Cuban cigar, a teapot, playing cards...

12. The ashtray is full of cigarette butts, even despite the inscription on the wall of the bunker. But these are the last days, and no one cared anymore. The inscription on the stub of the cigar reads “only for the Wehrmacht.”

13. Cigarettes and matches. The inscription on the matches is One Reich, One People, One Fuhrer. On Sulima cigarettes there is a German excise stamp of that time.

14.

15. Here is also a bottle of Rhine wine brand Bruner, 1940, and a regimental diary that has not yet been started.

16. Near the telephone set - some money, a grenade, a Luger pistol. Judging by the scantly displayed cartridges for him, the general was thinking about something for a long time at that moment. Perhaps over the fact that all he had to do was load the gun, and...

17. Map of encircled Berlin on the general’s right hand. It is she who leads him to more and more inevitable thoughts.

18. Radio station and a general’s cap on it. The general could listen to news, both German and catch the wave of the Allies. In the installation you can listen to several messages - several speeches by Hitler, Churchill's speech about England's entry into World War II, a speech from a German announcer about the defeat at Stalingrad.