Underground Reich. The Third Reich goes underground

In Poland and Germany, there are still legends about mysterious underground fortifications, lost in the forests of northwestern Poland and designated on Wehrmacht maps as “Camp earthworm" This concreted and reinforced underground city remains to this day one of the terra incognita of the 20th century. “In the early 1960s, I, a military prosecutor, had the opportunity to leave Wroclaw via Wołów, Głogów, Zielona Góra and Międziżecz to Kenszyca on an urgent matter,” says retired Colonel of Justice Alexander Liskin. “This small settlement, lost in the folds of the relief of northwestern Poland, seemed to be completely forgotten.

All around are gloomy, impenetrable forests, small rivers and lakes, old minefields, gouges nicknamed “dragon’s teeth,” and ditches overgrown with thistles that we broke through fortified Wehrmacht areas. Concrete, barbed wire, mossy ruins - all these are the remnants of a powerful defensive rampart, which once had the goal of “covering” the Fatherland in case the war went into reverse. The Germans called Mendzierzec Meseritz. The fortified area, which also included Kenshitsa, was called “Mezeritsky”. I have been to Kenshitsa before. To a visitor, the life of this village is almost invisible: peace, quiet, the air is filled with the aromas of the nearby forest. Here, in a little-known patch of Europe to the world, the military talked about the secret of the forest lake Krzyva, located somewhere nearby, in the cover of a remote coniferous forest. But no details. More like rumors, speculation... I remember driving along an old paved road, sagging in places, to the location of one of the communications brigades of the Northern Group of Forces.

The five-battalion brigade was located in a former German military town, hidden from prying eyes in a green forest. Once upon a time, this very place was marked on Wehrmacht maps with the toponym “Regenwurmlager” - “Earthworm Camp”. The driver, Corporal Vladimir Chernov, drills the dirt road with his eyes and at the same time listens to the work of the carburetor of the car recently returned from overhaul. On the left is a sandy slope overgrown with spruce trees. Spruce and pine trees seem to be the same everywhere. But here they look gloomy. Forced stop. I guess there is a large hazel tree near the side of the road. I leave the corporal at the raised hood and slowly climb up the scree sand. The end of July is harvest time hazelnuts. Walking around the bush, I unexpectedly come across an old grave: a blackened wooden Catholic cross, on which hangs an SS helmet, covered with a thick web of cracks; at the base of the cross there is a white ceramic jar with dried wildflowers. In the sparse grass I detect the melted parapet of a trench, blackened spent cartridges from a German heavy machine gun"MG". From here, this road was probably once well covered.

I return to the car. From below, Chernov waves his hands at me and points to the slope. A few more steps, and I see stacks of old mortar shells sticking out of the sand. It was as if they had been torn apart by meltwater, rain, and wind: the stabilizers were covered with sand, the fuses heads were sticking out. Just late... A dangerous place in a quiet forest. After about ten minutes of walking, the wall of the former camp, made of huge boulders, appeared. About a hundred meters from it, near the road, like a concrete pillbox, a gray two-meter dome of some kind of engineering structure. On the other side are the ruins of what is obviously a mansion. On the wall, as if cutting off the road from the military camp, almost no traces of bullets and shrapnel are visible.

According to the stories of local residents, there were no protracted battles here; the Germans could not withstand the onslaught. When it became clear to them that the garrison (two regiments, the school of the SS division “Totenkopf” and support units) could be surrounded, it was urgently evacuated. It is difficult to imagine how it was possible for almost an entire division to escape from this natural trap in a few hours. And where? If the only road we are traveling on has already been intercepted by tanks of the 44th Guards tank brigade First Guards Tank Army of General M.E. Katukov. The first to “ram” and find a gap in the minefields of the fortified area was the tank battalion of the guard of Major Alexei Karabanov, posthumously Hero of the Soviet Union. It was somewhere here that he burned down in his wounded car in the last days of January 1945...

I remember the Kenshitsy garrison like this: behind a stone wall there are lines of barracks buildings, a parade ground, sports grounds, a canteen, a little further - the headquarters, classrooms, hangars for equipment and communications equipment. The important brigade was part of the elite forces that provided General Staff command and control of troops across the vast expanse of the European theater of operations. From the north, Lake Kshiva approaches the camp, comparable in size, for example, to Cheremenetskoye, which is near St. Petersburg, or Dolgiy, near Moscow. Amazingly beautiful, the Kenshitsy forest lake is surrounded everywhere by signs of mystery, with which even the air seems to be saturated here.

From 1945 and almost until the end of the 1950s, this place was, in fact, only under the supervision of the security department of the city of Międzierzecz - where, as they say, he was supervised by a Polish officer named Telutko in his service - and the commander stationed somewhere near the Polish artillery regiment. With their direct participation, the temporary transfer of the territory of the former German military camp to our communications brigade was carried out. The convenient town fully met the requirements and seemed to have everything in full view. At the same time, the prudent command of the brigade decided at the same time not to violate the rules for quartering troops and ordered a thorough engineering and sapper reconnaissance to be carried out in the garrison and the surrounding area.

This is where discoveries began that captured the imagination of even experienced front-line soldiers who were still serving at that time. Let's start with the fact that near the lake, in a reinforced concrete box, an insulated underground outlet was discovered. power cable, instrument measurements on the conductors of which showed the presence of an industrial current with a voltage of 380 volts. Soon the sappers' attention was drawn to a concrete well, which swallowed water falling from a height. At the same time, intelligence reported that perhaps underground power communications were coming from the direction of Mendzizhech.

However, the presence of a hidden autonomous power plant and the fact that its turbines were rotated by water falling into the well could not be ruled out. They said that the lake was somehow connected to the surrounding bodies of water, and there are many of them here. The brigade's sappers were unable to verify these assumptions. The SS units that were in the camp during the fateful days of 1945 disappeared into thin air. Since it was impossible to go around the lake along the perimeter due to the impassability of the forest, I, taking advantage of Sunday afternoon, asked the commander of one of the companies, Captain Gamow, to show me the area from the water. They got into the boat and, alternately changing oars and making short stops, circled the lake in a few hours; we walked very close to the shore. On the eastern side of the lake, several powerful waste heap hills, already covered with undergrowth, rose. In some places they could be seen as artillery caponiers, facing east and south. We also managed to notice two small lakes that looked like puddles. Nearby stood signs with inscriptions in two languages: “Danger! Mines!

— Do you see the waste heaps? How Egyptian pyramids. There are various secret passages and holes inside them. Through them, our radio relay operators retrieved facing slabs from underground when setting up the garrison. They said that “there” were real galleries. As for these puddles, according to the sappers, these are the flooded entrances to the underground city,” said Gamow and continued: “I recommend looking at another mystery - an island in the middle of the lake.” Several years ago, low-altitude watchmen noticed that this island was not, in fact, an island in the usual sense. He floats, or rather, slowly drifts, standing as if at anchor. I looked around. The floating island is overgrown with spruce and willow trees. Its area did not exceed fifty square meters, and it seemed that he was really swaying slowly and heavily on the black water of a quiet reservoir. The forest lake also had a clearly artificial southwestern and southern extension, reminiscent of an appendix. Here the pole went two to three meters deep, the water was relatively clear, but wildly growing fern-like algae completely covered the bottom. In the middle of this bay, a gray reinforced concrete tower rose gloomily, clearly having once had a special purpose. Looking at her, I remembered the air intakes of the Moscow metro, accompanying its deep tunnels. Through the narrow window it was clear that there was water inside the concrete tower. There was no doubt: somewhere below me there was an underground structure, which for some reason had to be built right here, in remote places near Mendzizhech.

But the acquaintance with the “Earthworm Camp” did not end there. During the same engineering reconnaissance, sappers discovered the entrance to the tunnel disguised as a hill. Already at a first approximation, it became clear that this was a serious structure, moreover, probably with various kinds of traps, including mines. They said that once a tipsy foreman on his motorcycle decided to take a bet through a mysterious tunnel. The reckless driver was allegedly never seen again. All these facts needed to be checked and clarified, and I turned to the brigade command. It turned out that the sappers and signalmen of the brigade, as part of a special group, not only descended into it, but moved away from the entrance to a distance of at least ten kilometers. True, no one disappeared in it. The result is that several previously unknown entrances were discovered. For obvious reasons, information about this unusual expedition remained confidential. One of the headquarters officers and I walked out of the unit’s territory, and the already familiar “steps to nowhere” and a gray concrete dome similar to a pillbox, sticking out facelessly on the other side of the road, immediately caught our eye. “This is one of the entrances to the underground tunnel,” the officer explained. - You understand that such revelations can disturb minds.

This circumstance, taking into account our legal situation in the host country, prompted us to weld a steel grate and armor plate onto the entrance to the tunnel. No tragedies! We were obliged to exclude them. True, the underground entrances known to us make us think that there are others. - So what's there? “Below us, as far as one can assume, is an underground city, where there is everything necessary for autonomous life for many years,” the officer answered. “One of the participants in that same search group, created by order of the brigade commander, Colonel Doroshev,” he continued, “technician-captain Cherepanov, later said that through this pillbox that we see, along steel spiral staircases, they sank deep into the ground. By the light of acid lanterns we entered the underground metro. This was precisely the metro, since a railway track was laid along the bottom of the tunnel. The ceiling had no signs of soot. There is neat cable routing along the walls. The locomotive here was probably driven by electricity.

The group did not enter the tunnel at the beginning. The beginning of the tunnel was somewhere under a forest lake. The other part was directed to the west - to the Oder River. Almost immediately they discovered an underground crematorium. Perhaps it was in its furnaces that the remains of the dungeon builders burned. Slowly, taking precautions, the search party moved through the tunnel in the direction of modern Germany. Soon they stopped counting the tunnel branches - dozens of them were discovered. Both to the right and to the left. But most of the branches were carefully walled up. Perhaps these were approaches to unknown objects, including parts of the underground city. The grandiose underground network remained a labyrinth fraught with many dangers for the uninitiated. It was not possible to thoroughly check it. The tunnel was dry - a sign of good waterproofing. It seemed that on the other, unknown side, the lights of a train or a large truck were about to appear (vehicles could also move there)... According to Cherepanov, it was a man-made underground world, which is excellent implementation engineering thought. The captain said that the group moved slowly, and after several hours of being underground, they began to lose the feeling of what they had actually accomplished.

One of its participants came up with the idea that the study of a conserved underground city, laid under forests, fields and rivers, is a task for specialists of a different level. This different level required a lot of effort, money and time. According to our military estimates, the subway could stretch for tens of kilometers and “dive” under the Oder. It was hard to even guess where it would go next and where its final station would be. Soon the leader of the group decided to return. The results of the reconnaissance were reported to the brigade commander. “It turns out that there were battles above, tanks and people were burning,” I thought out loud, “and below lived the giant concrete arteries of a mysterious city.” It’s hard to imagine something like this when you’re in this gloomy land. Frankly speaking, the first information about the scale of the secret dungeon was scant, but it was amazing. As the former chief of staff of the brigade, Colonel P.N. Kabanov, testifies, shortly after the memorable first inspection, the commander of the Northern Group of Forces, Colonel General P.S. Maryakhin, came from Legnica to Kenshitsa and personally went down to the underground metro. Later, I had the opportunity to meet and repeatedly talk in detail about the “Earthworm Camp” with one of the last commanders of the Kenshitsy brigade, Colonel V.I. Spiridonov.

Gradually, a new vision of this military mystery, unusual in its scale, took shape. It turned out that in the period from 1958 to 1992, the five-battalion brigade had nine commanders in succession, and each of them - like it or not - had to adapt to the proximity to this unsolved underground territory. Spiridonov’s service in the brigade took place in two stages. At the first, in the mid-1970s, Vladimir Ivanovich was a staff officer, and at the second, a brigade commander. According to him, almost all the commanders of the Northern Group of Forces (SGV) considered it their duty to visit the distant garrison and personally get acquainted with the underground labyrinths. According to the engineering report, which Spiridonov had a chance to read, 44 kilometers of underground communications were discovered and examined just under the garrison. Vladimir Ivanovich still has photographs of some objects of the old German defense near Kenshitsa. On one of them is the entrance to an underground tunnel.

The officer testifies that the height and width of the underground metro shaft are approximately three meters each. The neck smoothly lowers and dives underground to a depth of fifty meters. There, the tunnels branch and intersect, and there are transport interchanges. Spiridonov also points out that the walls and ceiling of the metro are made of reinforced concrete slabs, the floor is lined with rectangular stone slabs. He personally, as a specialist, drew attention to the fact that this secret highway was pierced into the thickness of the earth in a western direction, towards the Oder, which is 60 kilometers from Kenshitsa in a straight line. He had heard that in the section where the subway dives under the Oder, the tunnel was flooded. With one of the commanders of the SGV, Spiridonov descended deep underground and drove at least 20 kilometers through a tunnel towards Germany in an army UAZ. The former brigade commander believes that the taciturn Pole, known in Mendzierzecz as Doctor Podbielski, knew about the underground city.

At the end of the 1980s, he was almost ninety years old... A passionate local historian, in the late 1940s - early 1950s, alone, at his own peril and risk, he repeatedly descended underground through a discovered hole. In the late 1980s, Podbelsky said that the Germans began building this strategic facility back in 1927, but most actively since 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany. In 1937, the latter personally arrived at the camp from Berlin and, as they claimed, on the rails of the secret subway. In fact, from that moment on, the hidden city was considered to be handed over to the Wehrmacht and the SS. Through some hidden communications, the gigantic object was connected to the plant and strategic storage facilities, also underground, located in the area of ​​the villages of Vysoka and Peski, two to five kilometers west and north of the lake. Lake Krzywa itself, the colonel believes, amazes with its beauty and purity. Oddly enough, the lake is an integral part of the mystery. The area of ​​its mirror is at least 200 thousand square meters, and the depth scale is from 3 (in the south and west) to 20 meters (in the east). It was in its eastern part that some army fishing enthusiasts managed to summer time in favorable lighting, you can see on the silted bottom something that, in its outline and other features, resembles a very large hatch, which received the nickname “the eye of the underworld” from the military.

The so-called “eye” was tightly closed. Wasn’t it supposed to be protected from the view of the pilot and the heavy bomb by the above-mentioned floating island? What could such a hatch serve for? Most likely, it served as a kingstone for emergency flooding of part or all of the underground structures. But if the hatch is closed to this day, it means it was not used in January 1945. Thus, it cannot be ruled out that the underground city was not flooded, but was preserved “until special occasion" Do its underground horizons hold something? Who are they waiting for? Spiridonov noticed that around the lake, in the forest, there were many preserved and destroyed wartime objects. Among them are the ruins of a rifle complex and a hospital for the elite SS troops. Everything was made of reinforced concrete and fire bricks. And most importantly - powerful pillboxes. Their reinforced concrete and steel domes were once armed heavy machine guns and guns, equipped with semi-automatic ammunition supply mechanisms. Under the meter-long armor of these caps, underground floors went to a depth of 30-50 meters, where sleeping and living quarters, ammunition and food warehouses, as well as communication centers were located.

Spiridonov personally examined six pillboxes located to the south and west of the lake. As they say, he never got around to the northern and eastern pillboxes. The approaches to these deadly firing points were reliably covered minefields, ditches, concrete gouges, barbed wire, engineering traps. They were at the entrance to every pillbox. Imagine, a bridge leads from the armored door into the pillbox, which will immediately tip over under the feet of the uninitiated, and he will inevitably fall into a deep concrete well, from where he will no longer be able to rise alive. At great depths, pillboxes are connected by passages to underground labyrinths. During the years of the colonel’s service in the brigade, his subordinates more than once reported to him that the “soldier’s radio” reported secret holes in the foundation of the garrison club, through which unidentified servicemen allegedly went “AWOL.” These rumors, fortunately, were not confirmed. However, such messages had to be checked carefully. But as for the basement of the mansion in which the brigade commander himself lived, the rumors about the manholes were confirmed.

So, having decided one day to check the reliability of his home, one Sunday he began tapping the walls with a crowbar. In one place the blows were particularly dull. Having struck with force, the officer lost his weapon: the steel crowbar “flew” into the void under its own weight. It’s up to the “small” to explore further... But, strangely enough, they don’t get around to it! “So this is what the earthworm “dug up” in the wilderness! Did he really develop a network of underground cities and communications all the way to Berlin? And isn’t it here, in Kenshitsa, the key to unraveling the mystery of the concealment and disappearance of the “Amber Room” and other treasures stolen in the countries of Eastern Europe?

Europe and, above all, Russia? Maybe "Regenwurmlager" is one of the objects of Nazi Germany's preparation for possessing an atomic bomb? In 1992, the communications brigade left Kenshitsa.

Over the last 34 years of the history of the Kenshitsy garrison, several tens of thousands of soldiers and officers served in it, and by turning to their memory, one can probably restore a lot interesting details underground mystery near Mendzierzec. Perhaps the veterans of the 44th Guards Tank Brigade of the 1st Guards Tank Army, their military neighbors on the right and left, remember the storming of the “Earthworm Camp” former warriors 8th Guards Army at that time Colonel General V.I. Chuikov and 5th Army Lieutenant General Berzarin? “Do people in modern Poland know about the “Earthworm Camp?” - Alexander Ivanovich Lukin asks at the end of his story. - Of course, to understand it to the end, if possible, is the business of the Poles and Germans. There are probably documentary traces, living builders and users of this military engineering phenomenon left in Germany.

What's hiding in the dungeons of a former secret Nazi factory recently discovered in Austria? Perhaps a laboratory for the production of atomic weapons?

In an underground tunnel. Photo: ZDF

Landslides are a common occurrence in Austria and its mountainous regions. In some cases, they are so powerful that as a result, houses are destroyed and large areas of forest are destroyed. Frequent rains in the foothills are the main, but not the only reasons for this. Soil collapse also occurs in places where underground there is a gigantic network of underground tunnels and bunkers stretching for tens of kilometers - former military factories of the “Third Reich”.

Austrian find

These secret underground factories are one of the Nazis' most ambitious projects. Work on creating a new “miracle weapon,” which was supposed to turn the tide of a long-lost war and bring victory to the Third Reich, did not stop there until the very surrender of Nazi Germany.

According to experts, the largest object of this kind in Austria was an underground complex codenamed Bergkristall (“Mountain Crystal”). Total area its mines and adits are supposedly almost 300 thousand square meters. Late last year, the entrance to this underground labyrinth was discovered by the film crew of an Austrian documentary filmmaker Andreas Sulzer(Andreas Sulzer) in the vicinity of the town of St. Georg an der Gusen, about 20 kilometers from Linz.

What secrets are hidden in this dungeon? Photo: ZDF

Filmmakers worked there on a project about the V-1 and V-2 rocket program. The film was shot at the request of the German television company ZDF. Its creators tried to restore details of the biography of the SS Obergruppenführer, General Hans Kammler, responsible for the Third Reich missile program.

Prisoners at construction

Some experts believe that it was in these underground laboratories that work was carried out to create an atomic bomb. There are grounds for such assumptions: the level of radiation here today exceeds the norm.

According to other historians, the network of labyrinths found by Austrian filmmakers was primarily occupied by the Nazi underground factory B 8 Bergkristall, where, in particular, the world's first turbojet military aircraft, the Messerschmitt ME262, were produced.

According to documents found during archival research, a military facility near St. Georg an der Gusen was built in 1944. It was built by forced laborers from Eastern Europe and prisoners of the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp.

According to the Austrian historian Johannes Sachslener(Johannes Sachslehner), the results of whose research the weekly Spiegel refers to, of the 60-70 thousand prisoners involved in the facility in St. Georg an der Gusen, about 10 thousand died - due to the harshest working conditions and cruel treatment. In total, the number of those who died during the construction of Nazi underground factories was about 320 thousand people, scientists believe.

No documentation

By order of the Austrian authorities after World War II, most of the Nazi underground tunnels (at least their entrances) were filled with concrete or filled with earth. But a number of labyrinths were simply freed from equipment, the dismantling of which was carried out by representatives of the victorious powers, and some of them began to be rented out. Austrian farmers used the dungeons, for example, to store agricultural machinery and grow mushrooms.

Most of the labyrinths are walled up. Photo: ZDF

But over time, water began to leak through the vaults of the underground halls, they became damp and began to collapse, and repairs required considerable funds. The land on which Austria's network of former Nazi secret sites is located is managed by the Austrian Federal Real Estate Company (Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft, BIG). In total we are talking about about 150 tunnels. It’s not clear what to do with them. Even just using these land plots It is dangerous for residential or office development: the risk of landslides is too great.

The 10-kilometer tunnel, where the Third Reich's most secret weapons were allegedly developed, is almost completely walled up. Only two kilometers of the labyrinth remained untouched. BIG prohibits excavations there due to increased radiation. But there is no documentation related to the object. According to Andreas Sulzer, based on information obtained from the archives, it was taken out in 1955 by the command of the Soviet troops stationed here at that time. There is no access to it now.

By the end of 1943 it became obvious that the Second world war Germany lost. The Allies reliably seized the initiative, and the final defeat of the Third Reich was only a matter of time. Nevertheless, Hitler did not want to put up with the inevitable outcome. In response to the massive bombing of German cities by US and British aircraft, the Fuhrer, as usual, impulsively ordered the transfer of military industry countries into colossal mountain bunkers. Onliner.by tells how, in just a few months, dozens of vital factories for the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe disappeared underground, including the production of top-secret “weapons of retaliation,” Hitler’s last hope, and what price the world paid for it.

Already in 1943, World War II came to Germany in earnest. There was still a lot of time left before the Allied troops entered the Third Reich, but the inhabitants of the country could no longer sleep peacefully in their beds. Since the summer of 1942, British and US aviation began to gradually move from the practice of targeted raids on strategic Nazi military infrastructure facilities to so-called carpet bombings. In 1943, their intensity increased significantly, reaching a peak the following year (900 thousand tons of bombs dropped in total).

The Germans needed to first save their military industry. In 1943, at the proposal of the Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, a program was developed to decentralize German industry, which involved the relocation of the most important industries for the army from large cities to small ones. settlements mainly in the east of the country. Hitler, however, had a different opinion. In his characteristically categorical manner, he demanded that military plants and factories be hidden underground, in existing mines and other mine workings, as well as in giant bunkers newly built in the mountains throughout the country.

The Nazis were no strangers to such projects. By this time, powerful bunker systems had been built in Berlin, Munich, Hitler's main headquarters on the Eastern Front, the Wolf's Lair in Rastenburg, and his summer Alpine residence in Obersalzberg. Other top leaders of the Third Reich also had their own fortified facilities of this kind. Since the same 1943, in the Owl Mountains in Lower Silesia (in the territory of modern southwestern Poland), the so-called “Giant” project (Projekt Riese), the new main headquarters of the Fuhrer, would have been actively implemented, replacing the already doomed “Wolf’s Lair”.

It was assumed that a grandiose system of seven objects at once would be built here, which could accommodate senior management Reich, and the command of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe. The center of the "Giant", apparently, was supposed to be a complex under Mount Wolfsberg ("Wolf Mountain"), whose name aptly reflected the Fuhrer's passion for everything connected with wolves. Within a year, they managed to build a network of tunnels with a total length of more than 3 kilometers and large underground halls with a height of up to 12 meters and a total area of ​​over 10 thousand square meters.

The remaining objects were implemented on a much more modest scale. At the same time, in its most complete form (about 85% of completion) there was a bunker under the largest castle in Silesia, Fürstenstein (modern Księż), where, again according to indirect data, Hitler’s ceremonial residence was to be located. Under Fürstenstein, two additional floors appeared (at a depth of 15 and 53 meters, respectively) with tunnels and halls in the rock, connected to the surface and the castle itself by elevator shafts and stairs.

The specific purpose of other objects is difficult to determine; practically no documents on the top-secret “Giant” project have been preserved. However, judging by the configuration of the implemented part of the complex, it can be assumed that at least some of its bunkers were planned to be occupied by industrial enterprises.

Active work to transfer the most important industrial enterprises underground for the war economy began only in 1944. Despite the active resistance of the Reich Minister of Armaments Speer, who believed that such a large-scale task could only be solved within a few years, the project received Hitler’s personal approval. Franz Xaver Dorsch, the new head of the Todt Organization, the largest military construction conglomerate of the Reich, was appointed responsible for its implementation. Dorsch promised the Fuhrer that in just six months he would have time to complete the construction of six gigantic industrial facilities with an area of ​​90 thousand square meters each.

Aircraft manufacturing enterprises were to be sheltered first. For example, in May 1944, under the Houbirg mountain near Nuremberg in Franconia, construction began on an underground plant where it was planned to produce BMW aircraft engines. After the end of the war, Speer wrote in his memoirs: “In February 1944, the raids were carried out on huge factories that produced aircraft bodies, and not on factories that produced aircraft engines, although it is the number of engines that is crucial for the aircraft industry. If the number of aircraft engines produced were reduced, we would not be able to increase aircraft production.”

The project, codenamed Dogger, was a very typical underground factory for the Reich. Several parallel tunnels were laid in the mountain mass, connected by perpendicular adits. In the dense grid formed in this way, additional large halls were arranged for production operations that required more space. There were several exits from the mountain, and raw materials and finished products were transported using a special narrow-gauge railway.

The construction of the Dogger facility was also carried out using the traditional method. Labor force There was an acute shortage in the Reich, so all the country's underground factories were built thanks to the merciless exploitation of concentration camp prisoners and prisoners of war. At each of the future grandiose bunkers, a concentration camp was first created (unless, of course, it already existed in the neighborhood), the main task of the victims of which was construction - at an unimaginable pace, around the clock, in the most difficult conditions. mountain conditions- military enterprises.

The BMW aircraft engine plant under the Houbirg mountain was not completed. By the end of the war, the prisoners of the Flossenburg camp managed to build only 4 kilometers of tunnels with a total area of ​​14 thousand square meters. After the end of the war, the facility, which began to collapse almost immediately, was mothballed. The entrances to the underground workings were sealed, most likely, forever. Of the 9.5 thousand forced construction workers of the complex, half died.

Unlike the Dogger project, the plant called Bergkristall (“Rock Crystal”) was completed. In just 13 months, by the spring of 1945, prisoners of the Gusen II concentration camp, one of the many branches of Mauthausen, erected about 10 kilometers of underground tunnels with a total area of ​​more than 50 thousand square meters - one of the largest facilities of its kind in the Third Reich.

The enterprise was intended to produce the ultra-modern Messerschmitt Me.262 fighter-bombers, the world's first production jet aircraft. By April 1945, when Bergkristall was captured by American troops, almost a thousand Me.262s had been produced there. But this facility will go down in history for the monstrous living and working conditions created on it for construction prisoners. Average duration their life was four months. In total, according to various estimates, from 8 thousand to 20 thousand people died during the construction of the complex.

Often, existing mine workings, natural caves and other shelters were converted to accommodate military enterprises. For example, in the former gypsum mine Seegrotte (“Lake Grotto”) near Vienna, the production of He.162 jet fighters was organized, and in the Engelberg tunnel of the A81 autobahn near Stuttgart, spare parts for aircraft were produced.

Dozens and dozens of similar enterprises were created in 1944. For the construction of some of them, even a mountain was not needed. For example, mass production of the same Me.262 (up to 1200 units per month) was planned to be organized in six giant factories, only one of which was located under the mountain. The remaining five were “recessed” semi-underground five-story bunkers 400 meters long and 32 meters high.

Of the five planned factories of this type, they managed to begin construction of one, in Upper Bavaria, codenamed Weingut I (“Vineyard-1”). Work began in an underground tunnel specially built on the site, located at a depth of 18 meters. From there the soil was removed and the foundations of 12 huge concrete arches up to 5 meters thick were built, which served as the floors of the complex. In the future, it was planned to fill the arches with earth and plant vegetation on them, disguising the factory as a natural hill.

Builders from several neighboring concentration camps managed to build only seven of the planned dozen arches. 3 thousand out of 8.5 thousand prisoners who worked at the construction site died. After the war, the American occupation administration decided to blow up the unfinished bunker, but the 125 tons of dynamite used could not cope with one of the arches.

However, the Nazis managed to complete the construction of their largest underground plant. In August 1943, under Mount Konstein near the city of Nordhausen, construction began on a facility called Mittelwerke (“Middle Plant”) in official documents. It was here, in the Harz mountain range in the center of Germany, that the production of “weapons of retaliation” (Vergeltungswaffe), the same “wunderwaffe”, “miracle weapon” with the help of which the Third Reich first wanted to take revenge on the Allies for the carpet bombing of their cities, was to be launched , and then again radically turn the tide of the war.

In 1917, a industrial production gypsum In the 1930s, the no longer used mines were turned into a strategic arsenal fuels and lubricants Wehrmacht It was these tunnels, primarily due to the relative ease of mining soft gypsum rock, that it was decided to expand enormously, creating on their basis the largest center for the production of new generation weapons in the Reich - the world's first ballistic missile A-4, Vergeltungswaffe-2, " retaliation weapon - 2", which went down in history under the symbol V-2 ("V-2").

On August 17-18, 1943, Royal Air Force bombers carried out Operation Hydra, which targeted the German Peenemünde missile center in the northeast of the country. A massive raid on the test site showed its vulnerability, after which a decision was made to transfer the production of the latest weapons to the center of Germany, to an underground plant. Just 10 days after Hydra and the launch of the Mittelwerke project, on August 28, a concentration camp called Dora-Mittelbau was established near Nordhausen. Over the next year and a half, about 60 thousand prisoners were transferred here, mainly from Buchenwald, whose branch Dora became. A third of them, 20 thousand people, never saw liberation, dying in the tunnels near Konstein.

The most difficult months were October, November and December 1943, when major work was carried out to expand the Mittelwerke mine system. Thousands of unfortunate prisoners, malnourished, sleep-deprived, subjected to physical punishment at the slightest provocation, were blasting rock around the clock, transporting it to the surface, and setting up a secret factory where the most modern weapons on the planet were to be born.

In December 1943, Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer visited Mittelwerke: “In spacious long adits, prisoners installed equipment and laid pipes. When our group passed by, they tore their blue twill berets off their heads and looked indifferently, as if through us.”

Speer was one of the conscientious Nazis. After the war in Spandau prison, where he served all 20 years assigned to him by the Nuremberg Tribunal, including for the inhumane exploitation of concentration camp prisoners, Speer wrote “Memoirs”, in which, in particular, he admitted: “I am still tormented by a feeling of deep personal guilt. Even then, after inspecting the plant, the overseers told me about unsanitary conditions, about the damp caves in which the prisoners lived, about rampant diseases, about the extremely high mortality rate. On the same day, I ordered to bring all the necessary materials for the construction of barracks on the slope of a neighboring mountain. In addition, I demanded that the SS command of the camp take all necessary measures to improve sanitary conditions and increase food rations.”

This initiative of Hitler’s favorite architect was not particularly successful. Soon he became seriously ill and could not personally control the implementation of his orders.

Built in as soon as possible The underground plant consisted of two parallel tunnels, curved in the shape of the letter S and passing through Mount Konstein. The tunnels were connected by 46 perpendicular adits. In the northern part of the complex there was a plant code-named Nordwerke (“Northern Plant”), where engines for Junkers aircraft were produced. The Mittelwerke itself ("Middle Plant") occupied the southern half of the system. In addition, the never realized plans of the Nazis included the creation of a “Southern Plant” near Friedrichshafen and an “Eastern Plant” in the vicinity of Riga.

The width of the tunnels was sufficient to construct a full-fledged railway inside. Trains with spare parts and raw materials entered the complex through the northern entrances and left it from finished products on the south side of the mountain. The total area of ​​the complex by the end of the war reached 125 thousand square meters.

In July 1944, Hitler's personal photographer Walter Frentz took a picture for the Fuhrer special report from the bowels of Mittelwerke, which was supposed to demonstrate a full-fledged assembly production of “weapons of retaliation” created in the shortest possible time. Unique photographs were only recently discovered, which allowed us not only to see the largest underground factory in the Reich in working mode, but also in color.

Nordhausen and Mittelwerke were busy American troops in April 1945. This territory subsequently entered the Soviet zone of occupation, and three months later the Americans were replaced by Soviet specialists. One of the members of the scientific delegation that arrived at the plant to study the Nazi rocket experience, Boris Chertok, later an academician and one of Sergei Korolev’s closest associates, left interesting memories of his visit to the plant.

“The main tunnel for assembling V-2 missiles was more than 15 meters wide, and the height in individual spans reached 25 meters. In the transverse drifts, manufacturing, assembly, incoming inspection and testing of subassemblies and units were carried out before their installation on the main assembly.

The German, who was introduced as a test engineer at the assembly, said the plant was operating at full capacity almost until May. In the “best” months, its productivity reached 35 missiles per day! The Americans selected only fully assembled missiles from the plant. More than a hundred of them have accumulated here. They even organized electrical horizontal tests and, before the Russians arrived, loaded all the assembled missiles into special wagons and transported them to the west - to their zone. But here you can still recruit units for 10, and maybe 20 missiles.

The Americans, advancing from the west, already on April 12, that is, three months before us, had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the Mittelwerk. They saw underground production, which had only stopped a day before their invasion. Everything amazed them. There were hundreds of missiles underground and in special railway platforms. The plant and access roads were completely intact. The German guards fled.

Then we were told that more than 120 thousand prisoners passed through the camp. First they built - they gnawed at this mountain, then the survivors and even new ones worked in the factory underground. We found random survivors in the camp. There were many corpses in the tunnels underground.

In the adit, our attention was drawn to an overhead crane covering its entire width above the span for vertical testing and subsequent loading of missiles. Two beams were suspended from the crane along the width of the span, which were lowered, if necessary, to the height of human height. Loops were attached to the beams, which were thrown around the necks of prisoners who were guilty or suspected of sabotage. The crane operator, who is also the executioner, pressed the lift button, and immediately execution was carried out by mechanized hanging of up to sixty people. In front of all the “stripes,” as the prisoners were called, under bright electric lighting, under 70 meters of dense soil, a lesson in obedience and intimidation of saboteurs was given.”

With all this, the prisoners still sabotaged the V-2 production whenever possible, even despite the risk to their lives.

“The prisoners who worked on the assembly learned how to introduce a malfunction in such a way that it was not immediately detected, but affected itself after the rocket was sent, during its testing before launch or in flight. Someone taught them how to do unreliable soldering of electrical connections. This is very difficult to verify. German control personnel were unable to keep track of tens of thousands of rations per day.”

The V-2 rockets discovered by American and Soviet forces at Mittelwerke later formed the basis of both countries' space programs. Soviet experts noted: “If militarily the A-4 missile (aka V-2) had virtually no serious impact on the course of the war, in scientific and technical terms its creation was outstanding achievement German specialists, who received recognition from specialists from all countries who subsequently created missile weapons.” By 1945, the Germans managed to create almost the entire range of guided missile weapons, and who knows what else they would have achieved if the war had not ended.

It is known that in parallel with the production of the A-4 (“V-2”), German scientists and engineers worked on the project of the A-9/A-10 missile, which, in fact, was a full-fledged ballistic intercontinental carrier, the purpose of which was to retaliate not only against Great Britain , but also the USA. This was even reflected in its unofficial name Amerika-Rakete. It was planned that the “rocket for America” would be capable of traveling up to 5.5 thousand kilometers, carrying a load of 1 ton.

As part of this program, at the end of 1943, in the north-east of Austria, near the town of Ebensee, construction began on a new grandiose underground plant, codenamed Zement. Originally intended as a reserve command center for the Luftwaffe, it was later reformatted to produce V-2 missiles and anti-aircraft missiles Wasserfall (“Waterfall”). The next stage was to be the release of the intercontinental Amerika-Rakete.

The project was not completed, but the tunnels and halls that were built give an idea of ​​the scale of the products planned for production here. By the end of 1944, in the workings, which reached a height of 30 meters, they began producing spare parts for tanks.

The Nazis did not have enough time and resources to implement the intercontinental program. The Second World War would have seriously dragged on if Hitler had not made a catastrophic mistake before it began: after all, Amerika-Rakete was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

Speer wrote in his memoirs: “Hitler sometimes talked to me about the possibility of creating an atomic bomb, but this problem clearly went beyond his intellectual capabilities; he failed to understand the revolutionary significance of nuclear physics. Perhaps we would have been able to create an atomic bomb in 1945, but this would have required the maximum mobilization of all technical, financial and scientific resources, that is, the abandonment of all other projects, for example, the development of missile weapons. From this point of view, the Peenemünde rocket center was not only our greatest, but also our most unsuccessful project.”

To the greatest happiness of all mankind, Hitler, who in table conversations called nuclear physics“Jewish”, did not understand the advantages of atomic weapons. And when they became obvious, at the height of the war, it was already too late: the Third Reich, economically and infrastructurally, could not ensure the implementation of two large projects at once - missile and nuclear.

The Americans, after occupying their part of Germany, were shocked by the scale of underground construction in the country. A special report sent to Air Force headquarters noted: “Although the Germans did not engage in large-scale construction of underground factories until March 1944, by the end of the war they managed to launch about 143 such factories. Another 107 factories were discovered, built or founded at the end of the war, to this can be added another 600 caves and mines, many of which were turned into assembly lines and laboratories for the production of weapons."

So we can only imagine what would have happened if the Germans had gone underground before the start of the war.

SECRET TUNNELS - TO NOWHERE

The spectacle is not for the faint of heart when, in the forest twilight, people emerge from the viewing slots of old pillboxes and armored caps, scurrying and squeaking. bats. The winged vampires decided that people had built these multi-story dungeons for them, and settled there long ago and reliably. Here, near the Polish city of Miedzyrze, lives the largest colony of pipistrelle bats in Europe - tens of thousands. But it's not about them, though military intelligence and chose the silhouette of a bat as her emblem.

There have been, are, and will continue to be legends about this area for a long time, each darker than the other.

"Let's start with this- says one of the pioneers of the local catacombs, Colonel Alexander Liskin, - that near a forest lake, in a reinforced concrete box, an insulated output of an underground power cable was discovered, instrument measurements on the cores of which showed the presence of an industrial current with a voltage of 380 volts. Soon the sappers' attention was drawn to a concrete well, which swallowed water falling from a height. At the same time, intelligence reported that perhaps underground power communications were coming from Miedzyrzech. However, the presence of a hidden autonomous power plant, and also the fact that its turbines were rotated by water falling into the well, could not be ruled out. They said that the lake was somehow connected to the surrounding bodies of water, and there are many of them here.

Sappers discovered the entrance to the tunnel disguised as a hill. Already at a first approximation, it became clear that this was a serious structure, moreover, probably with various kinds of traps, including mines. They said that once a tipsy foreman on his motorcycle decided to take a bet through a mysterious tunnel. The reckless driver was never seen again.”

Whatever they say, one thing is indisputable: there is no more extensive and more ramified underground fortified area in the world than the one that was dug in the Warta-Obra-Oder river triangle more than half a century ago. Until 1945, these lands were part of Germany. After the collapse of the Third Reich they returned to Poland. Only then did Soviet specialists descend into the top-secret dungeon. We went down, were amazed at the length of the tunnels and left. No one wanted to get lost, explode, disappear into the giant concrete catacombs that stretched tens (!) kilometers to the north, south and west. No one could say for what purpose the double-track narrow-gauge railways were laid there, where and why the electric trains ran through endless tunnels with countless branches and dead ends, what they carried on their platforms, who the passengers were. However, it is known for certain that Hitler visited this underground reinforced concrete kingdom at least twice, coded under the name “RL” - Regenwurmlager - “Earthworm Camp”.

Watch the movie:

The Reich Underground

At the end of World War II, huge unfinished tunnel systems were discovered throughout Germany by the victors. Hitler ordered the construction of some 800 underground complexes in an attempt to keep the German arms industry afloat. 60 years ago, the Allies tried to destroy them, including Hitler’s personal Alpine bunker. Entire sections of the tunnel system still remain unexplored.

For what?

Any study of a mysterious object is subject to this question. Why was the giant dungeon built? Why are hundreds of kilometers of electrified railways laid in it, and a good dozen other “why?” and "why?"

A local old-timer - a former tanker and now a taxi driver named Yuzef, taking with him a fluorescent flashlight, undertook to take us to one of the twenty-two underground stations. All of them were once designated by male and female names: “Dora”, “Martha”, “Emma”, “Emma”. The closest one to Miedzyrzecz is “Henrik”. Our guide claims that it was to his platform that Hitler arrived from Berlin, from here to go over the surface to his field headquarters near Rastenberg - “Wolfschanze”. This has its own logic - the underground route from Berlin made it possible to secretly leave the Reich Chancellery. And the Wolf’s Lair is only a few hours away by car.

Jozef drives his Polonaise along a narrow highway southwest of the city. In the village of Kalava we turn towards the Scharnhorst bunker. This is one of the strongholds of the Pomeranian Wall defensive system. And the places in the area are idyllic and do not fit in with these military words: hilly copses, poppies in the rye, swans in lakes, storks on the roofs, pine forests burning from the inside with the sun, roe deer roaming.

WELCOME TO HELL!

A picturesque hill with an old oak tree on top was crowned with two steel armored caps. Their massive, smoothed cylinders with slots looked like Teutonic knightly helmets, “forgotten” under the canopy of an oak tree.
The western slope of the hill ended with a concrete wall one and a half times the height of a man, into which was embedded an armored hermetic door the size of a third of an ordinary door and several air intake openings, again covered with armored shutters. They were the gills of an underground monster. Above the entrance there is an inscription sprayed from a can of paint: “Welcome to hell!” - “Welcome to hell!”

Under the watchful eye of the machine gun embrasure of the flank battle, we approach the armored door and open it with a long special key. The heavy but well-oiled door easily swings open, and another loophole looks into your chest - frontal combat. “If you entered without a pass, you received a burst of machine gun fire,” says her empty, unblinking gaze. This is the entrance vestibule chamber. Once upon a time, its floor treacherously collapsed, and the uninvited guest flew into the well, as was practiced in medieval castles. Now it is securely fastened, and we turn into a narrow side corridor that leads into the bunker, but after a few steps is interrupted by the main gas lock. We leave it and find ourselves at a checkpoint, where the guard once checked the documents of everyone entering and held the entrance hermetic door at gunpoint. Only after this can you enter the corridor leading to the combat casemates, covered with armored domes. One of them still contains a rusty rapid-fire grenade launcher, another housed a flamethrower unit, and the third contained heavy machine guns. Here is the commander’s “cabin” - “Führer-raum”, periscope enclosures, radio room, map storage, toilets and washbasin, as well as a disguised emergency exit.

On the floor below there are warehouses for consumable ammunition, a tank with a fire mixture, an entrance trap chamber, also known as a punishment cell, a sleeping compartment for the duty shift, a filter-ventilation enclosure... Here is the entrance to the underworld: wide - four meters in diameter - a concrete well goes vertically down to the depth of a ten-story Houses. The flashlight beam illuminates the water at the bottom of the mine. The concrete staircase descends along the shaft in steep, narrow flights.

“There are a hundred and fifty steps,” says Jozef. We follow him with bated breath: what’s below? And below, at a depth of 45 meters, there is a high-vaulted hall, similar to the nave of an ancient cathedral, except that it is assembled from arched reinforced concrete. The shaft along which the staircase wound ends here in order to continue even deeper, but now like a well, almost filled to the brim with water. Does it have a bottom? And why does the shaft overhanging it rise up all the way to the casemate floor? Jozef doesn't know. But he leads us to another well, narrower, covered with a manhole cover. This is the source drinking water. You can at least scoop it up now.

I look around the arches of the local Hades. What did they see, what was happening underneath them? This hall served the Scharnhorst garrison as a military camp with a rear base. Here, two-tiered concrete hangars “flowed” into the main tunnel, like tributaries into the riverbed. They housed two barracks for one hundred people, an infirmary, a kitchen, food and ammunition warehouses, a power plant, and a fuel storage facility. Trolley trains also rolled up here through the airlock gas mask chamber along the branch leading to the main tunnel to the Henrik station.

- Shall we go to the station? - asks our guide.

Jozef dives into a low and narrow corridor, and we follow him. The pedestrian road seems endless, we have been walking along it at an accelerated pace for a quarter of an hour, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. And there will be no light here, as, indeed, in all the other “earthworm holes.”

Only then do I notice how chilled I am in this cold dungeon: the temperature here is constant, whether in summer or winter, - 10oC. When I think about how thick the earth our gap-path stretches under, I feel completely uneasy. The low arch and narrow walls squeeze the soul - will we get out of here? What if the concrete ceiling collapses, and what if water rushes in? After all, for more than half a century, all these structures have not seen any maintenance or repair, they are holding back, but they are holding back both the pressure of the subsoil and the pressure of water...

When the phrase was already on the tip of the tongue: “Maybe we’ll go back?”, the narrow passage finally merged into a wide transport tunnel. Concrete slabs formed a kind of platform here. This was the Henrik station - abandoned, dusty, dark... I immediately remembered those stations of the Berlin metro, which until recent years were in similar desolation, since they were located under the wall that divided Berlin into eastern and western parts. They were visible from the windows of the blue express trains - these caverns of time frozen for half a century... Now, standing on the platform of the Henrik, it was not difficult to believe that the rails of this rusty double-track also reached the Berlin metro.

We turn into a side passage. Soon puddles began to squish underfoot, and drainage ditches ran along the edges of the walkway—ideal drinking bowls for bats. The flashlight beam jumped upward, and a large living cluster, made of bony-winged half-birds and half-animals, began to move above our heads. Cold goosebumps ran down my spine - what a nasty thing, though! Despite the fact that it’s useful, it eats mosquitoes.

They say that the souls of dead sailors inhabit seagulls. Then the souls of the SS men must turn into bats. And judging by the number of bats nesting under the concrete arches, the entire “Dead’s Head” division, which disappeared without a trace in the Mezeritsky dungeon in 1945, is still hiding from sunlight in the form of bats.

Get away, get away from here, and as quickly as possible! OUR TANK – OVER THE BUNKER

To the question “why was the Mezeritsky fortified area created”, military historians answer this way: in order to hang a powerful castle on the main strategic axis of Europe Moscow - Warsaw - Berlin - Paris.

The Chinese built their Great Wall, in order to cover the borders of the Celestial Empire from the invasion of nomads for thousands of years. The Germans did almost the same thing by erecting the Eastern Wall - Ostwall, with the only difference being that they laid their “wall” underground. They began building it back in 1927 and only ten years later they completed the first stage. Believing to sit behind this “impregnable” rampart, Hitler’s strategists moved from here, first to Warsaw, and then to Moscow, leaving captured Paris in the rear. The result of the great campaign to the east is known. Onslaught Soviet armies Neither anti-tank “dragon’s teeth”, nor armored dome installations, nor underground forts with all their medieval traps and the most modern weapons helped to hold back.

In the winter of 1945, Colonel Gusakovsky’s soldiers broke through this “impassable” line and moved directly to the Oder. Here, near Międzyrzecz, the tank battalion of Major Karabanov, who burned down in his tank, fought with the “Dead Head”. No extremists dared to destroy the monument to our soldiers near the village of Kalava. It is silently guarded by the memorial "thirty-four", even though it is now left behind NATO lines. Its gun faces west - towards the armored dome of the Scharnhorst bunker. The old tank went into a deep raid of historical memory. At night, bats circle above him, but sometimes flowers are placed on his armor. Who? Yes, those who still remember that victorious year, when these lands, dug up by the “earthworm” and still fertile, became Poland again.

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Already 70 years ago, the last shots of the Second World War died down, and its horrors and mysteries still haunt us. One of the still unsolved secrets of the Third Reich is the underground fortifications and laboratories built by the Nazis on the territory of Poland and modern Kaliningrad, the former Koenigsberg.

In the north of Poland's western border with Germany, where Berlin is just a stone's throw away - no more than a hundred kilometers - there is an underground city. The enormity of this structure amazes viewers with its size, but this is only a third of the construction planned by Adolf Hitler. Bunkers, train stations and even railways stretch for tens of kilometers at 50-100 meters underground, and the deepest mines are lost in kilometer-long darkness. Accurate map the city has not been found, and now the diggers have drawn up only a rough plan of passages and tunnels that go beyond this plan into nowhere. The dungeon was originally built medieval knights and served as shelter in cases of siege of their castles. German builders of the 20th century tried to turn it into a particularly fortified line of defense: the city’s casemates were built from heavy-duty materials that were not afraid of collapses or explosions. Construction was stopped when the decision was made to attack rather than defend.

No less amazing are the underground buildings under Royal Palace Kaliningrad, the construction of which began in the 17th century and was brought to perfection by the rulers of the Third Reich. Kaliningrad tunnels lead from the city center far beyond its borders. It was in them that the German top-secret laboratory worked in the early 40s of the last century. Everyone knows Hitler's commitment to the occult sciences and his cherished dream of creating an ideal nation in its perfection. This is exactly what the Koenigsberg underground organization of scientists and fans of their field did. Their work appears to have brought some tangible results, as there is authentic evidence of some unusual phenomena that took place at that time within the city. Thus, it is known for certain about the appearances and the same instant disappearances of an entire company of soldiers, dressed in the fashion of other eras and acting as if according to a given program. And to this day, Kaliningrad residents sometimes encounter “ghosts” of SS men simply on the streets or in developed photographs. What are these - the restless souls of the fascists or, perhaps, the world's first time machine, invented by them almost 100 years ago? This still remains an unsolved mystery. But the fact remains that there are many unexplored areas of Kaliningrad dungeons, secret rooms and trap rooms, into which amateurs who decide to study them on their own find themselves.

Polish and Kaliningrad underground bunkers not the only ones of their kind: the Nazis built something similar in various territories they conquered. There is an assumption that it was the dungeons of the Third Reich that hid both some military units that disappeared without a trace, as well as countless treasures looted by the Nazis during the war.