Underground structures of the 3rd Reich. Secrets of the Third Reich: SS Underground Cities

For many years, scientists from all over the world studied one of the most mysterious objects of the Nazis. And now the researchers are confident that they have never come close to unraveling the main secrets of these mysterious buildings.

Reporting by Dmitry Soshin.

Not just a bunker, a large underground fortress. Hitler wanted to seal the eastern borders of the Third Reich with a reinforced concrete castle. "Earthworm Lair" - the largest defensive system in Europe - was built for almost 10 years.

Sylvia Banek, historian-enthusiast: "Rails of a narrow-gauge railway pass here. During the war, electric trains ran here, they carried soldiers and equipment."

Underground life was so intense that the tunnels gradually became squares and stations, although without platforms and waiting rooms. The waypoints near the "Northern Station" still work like new.

Silvia Banek, a student from Poznań, has been studying the "Lair of the Earthworm" for a long time. She is one of the few who are allowed to bring curious historians and journalists here. 5 years ago, the authorities set up guards near the entrance to the bunker: they are worried not only by teenagers who draw "graffiti". People began to disappear into the dungeon - 30 kilometers of tunnels have not been fully explored.

Sylvia Banek, enthusiastic historian: "This is a rather dangerous place. There is no complete scheme of all firing points and all tunnels. We have to fence off all unexplored places."

Bats are the only guardians of the dungeon. There are so many of them here that the local authorities declared the old ventilation shafts a nature reserve.

Everything was in the underground city: railway stations, hospital, barracks. And in the wing was a large armory room. Toward the end of the war, workers were brought here and machines were installed. For the underground factory, the cable had to be re-laid.

Engines for combat aircraft were assembled in a Polish underground. The workshop worked until February 1945: by that time, the Red Army had encircled the Mezeretsky district.

Every year, on Victory Day, military-historical clubs "play out" the assault on the underground citadel. In fact, "Earthworm's Lair" was printed out in 2 days. The surviving defenders of pillbox No. 712, the only firing point that held the defense, were released by the Red Army men home.

Robert Yurga, historian-enthusiast: "There were almost no officers among the Germans, soldiers, almost boys, lived in concrete bags. It seems that the command simply forgot about them."

If earlier speleologists and thrill-seekers from Holland and Germany aspired here, recently the Poles living in the neighborhood want to go underground.

Sylvia Banek, historian-enthusiast: "They come here several times, and not to look at the rusty rails! They ask a lot of questions. They are not indifferent to how their homeland was liberated."

Historians from Warsaw dream of dismantling the brickwork and getting to the side, "reserve" tunnels. By order of Stalin, they were walled up immediately after the war. And, perhaps, then "Earthworm's Lair" will reveal all its secrets.

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Whatever they say, one thing is indisputable: there is no more extensive and more branched 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, marveled at the length of the tunnels and left. No one wanted to get lost, explode, disappear into giant concrete catacombs that stretched for tens (!) kilometers...

No one could say for what purpose double-track narrow-gauge railways were laid in them, where and why electric trains ran through endless tunnels with countless branches, dead ends, what they transported on their platforms, who was a passenger. However, it is known for certain that Hitler at least twice visited this underground reinforced concrete kingdom, coded under the name "RL" - Regenwurmlager - "Earthworm Camp".

The Third Reich goes underground
The spectacle is not for the faint of heart, when bats crawl and squeak out of the viewing slots of old pillboxes and armored caps in the forest twilight. The winged vampires decided that people had built these multi-storey dungeons for them, and settled there long ago and reliably. Here, not far from the Polish city of Miedzyrzecz, lives the largest colony of bats in Europe - tens of thousands. But this is not about them, although military intelligence has chosen the silhouette of a bat as its emblem.

Legends have been circulating about this area, circulating and will continue to circulate for a long time, one darker than the other.

Soon the attention of the sappers was attracted by a concrete well, which swallowed water falling from a height. At the same time, intelligence reported that, perhaps, underground power communication was coming from the direction of Miedzyrzecz. However, the presence of a hidden autonomous power plant, and also the fact that its turbines were rotated by water falling into a well, were not excluded. It was said that the lake was somehow connected to the surrounding water bodies, and there are many of them here.

The sappers discovered the entrance to the tunnel disguised as a hill. Already in the first approximation, it became clear that this is a serious structure, moreover, probably with various kinds of traps, including mines. It was said that once a tipsy foreman on his motorcycle decided to ride through the mysterious tunnel on a bet. We didn't see the scorcher again."

What for?

Under the sign of this question is any study of a mysterious object. Why was the gigantic dungeon built? Why are hundreds of kilometers of electrified railways laid in it, and a good dozen more all kinds of “why?” and why?"

A local old-timer, a former tanker and now a taxi driver named Jozef, took a fluorescent lamp with him and 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", "Berta". The closest to Miedzyrzech is Henryk. Our guide claims that it was to his platform that Hitler arrived from Berlin in order to go from here already over the surface to his field headquarters near Rastenberg - the 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 down the narrow highway southwest of town. In the village of Kalava, we turn towards the Scharnhorst bunker. This is one of the strongholds of the defensive system of the Pomor Wall. 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 the lakes, storks on the roofs, pine forests burning from the inside with the sun, roe deer roam.

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 slits looked like Teutonic knightly helmets, "forgotten" under the shadow of an oak crown.

The western slope of the hill was cut off by a concrete wall one and a half human height, into which an armored hermetic door was cut into a third of an ordinary door and several air intake holes, again taken away by armored shutters. They were the gills of an underground monster. Above the entrance is an inscription sprayed from a spray can with paint: "Welcome to hell!" - "Welcome to Hell!"

Once upon a time, its floor treacherously failed, and an intruder 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 in a checkpoint, where the guard once checked the documents of all incoming people and held the entrance pressure door at gunpoint. Only after that you can enter the corridor leading to the combat casemates, covered with armored domes.

One of them still has a rusty rapid-fire grenade launcher, another housed a flamethrower, the third housed a heavy machine gun. camouflaged emergency exit.

One floor below there are warehouses of expendable ammunition, a tank with fire mixture, an entrance trap chamber, it is also a punishment cell, a sleeping compartment for a shift on duty, a filter-ventilation enclosure ... Here is the entrance to the underworld: a wide one - four meters in diameter - a concrete well plummets down to a depth of a ten-story Houses. The beam of the lantern highlights the water at the bottom of the mine. A concrete staircase descends along the shaft in steep narrow flights.

“There are a hundred and fifty steps,” Jozef says. We follow him with bated breath: what is below? And below, at a depth of 45 meters, there is a high-arched hall, similar to the nave of an old cathedral, except that it was assembled from arched reinforced concrete. The shaft, along which the staircase wound, breaks off here in order to continue even deeper, but already like a well filled almost to the brim with water.

Does it have a bottom? And why does the shaft hanging over it rise up to the casemate floor? Joseph doesn't know. But he leads us to another well, narrower, covered with a manhole cover. This is a source of drinking water. Might as well grab it now.

I look around the arches of the local Hades. What did they see, what was happening under them? This hall served the Scharnhorst garrison as a military camp with a rear base. Here, two-tier concrete hangars “flowed” into the main tunnel, like tributaries into the channel. They housed two barracks for a hundred people, an infirmary, a kitchen, warehouses with food and ammunition, a power plant, and a fuel storage.

The trolley trains also rolled up here through the lock gas chamber along the branch line leading to the main tunnel to the Henrik station.
- Shall we go to the station? our guide asks.

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

Only then I notice how chilly it is in this frozen dungeon: the temperature here is constant, both in summer and in winter - 10oC. At the thought, under what thickness of the earth our gap-path stretches, it becomes completely uncomfortable. The low arch and narrow walls compress the soul - will we get out of here? And if the concrete ceiling collapses, and if water gushes? After all, for more than half a century, all these structures have not known any maintenance or repair, they are holding back, and yet they are holding back both the pressure of the bowels and the pressure of water ...

I immediately remembered those stations of the Berlin underground, which until recently were in a similar desolation, since they were under the wall that cut Berlin into eastern and western parts. They could be seen from the windows of blue express trains - these caverns of time frozen for half a century ... Now, standing on the Henrik platform, it was not difficult to believe that the rails of this rusty double-track reached the Berlin underground.

We turn to the side. Soon puddles sloshed underfoot, and drainage ditches stretched along the edges of the footpath - ideal drinkers for bats. The beam of the lantern jumped upwards, and above our heads moved a large living bunch, molded from bone-winged half-birds, half-animals. Cold goosebumps ran down the back - what a dirty trick, however! For nothing that it is useful - it eats mosquitoes.

They say that the souls of dead sailors inhabit seagulls. Then the souls of the SS must turn into bats. And judging by the number of bats nesting under concrete vaults, the entire “Dead Head” division, which disappeared without a trace in the 45th in the Mezeritsky dungeon, is still hiding from sunlight in the form of bat-winged creatures.

Get out, get out of here, and as soon as possible!

OUR TANK - OVER THE BUNKER

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

They began to build it back in 1927, and only ten years later they completed the first stage. Hoping to sit behind this "impregnable" shaft, the Nazi strategists moved from here, first to Warsaw, and then to Moscow, leaving captured Paris in the rear.

The outcome of the great campaign to the east is known. The onslaught of the Soviet armies was not helped by anti-tank "dragon's teeth", nor by armored domes, nor by underground forts with all their medieval traps and the most modern weapons.

In the winter of the forty-fifth, the fighters of Colonel Gusakovsky broke through this "impassable" line and moved directly to the Oder. Here, near Miedzyrzech, the tank battalion of Major Karabanov, who burned down in his tank, fought with the "Dead Head".

No extremists dared to break the monument to our fighters near the village of Kalava. It is silently guarded by the memorial “thirty-four”, even though now it has remained in the rear of NATO. Its cannon looks west - at the armored domes of the Scharnhorst bunker.

The old tank went into a deep raid of historical memory. At night, bats circle over 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, again became Poland.

The Nazi "Earthworm Camp", its existence has been known since the end of the war. But it still represents one of the most burning secrets of the Third Reich, and most of the questions have not yet been answered.

For the first time in the expanses of the former USSR, they began to talk about the "Earthworm Camp", in German "Regenwurmlager", in 1995. But the information that was published in the popular magazine "Around the World" was not widely disseminated then. But, thanks to the development of the Internet, more and more publications began to appear on the virtual network about the existence of the ruins of the Nazi underground city, lost in the forests of northwestern Poland, not far from its border with Germany. Moreover, unlike most other articles, in this case we are talking about a fact that is quite reliable and accessible for review. Which, however, not only does not reduce, but, on the contrary, increases interest in him from amateurs.

"Earthworm Camp" is the largest and most extensive known underground fortification in the world. It is dug in a triangle between the rivers Verta - Obra - Oder. And the famous entrance is located in the forests near the Polish city of Miedzyrzecz.

Until 1945, this land belonged to Germany and was transferred to Poland only at the end of the war. Because the Nazis had the opportunity to build a giant underground structure in strict secrecy. Presumably, underground work was started back in 1927, and after coming to power they were forced.

The "camp" was probably given great importance, although no one knows why it was dug. They only make guesses. Most likely, the "Camp" was assigned the role of a fortified area, which was supposed to serve as a springboard for an attack on Eastern Europe and protect Germany along the main strategic axis: Moscow - Warsaw - Berlin. It was from here that the German troops moved to Warsaw, and then to Moscow.

1945, winter - after the capture of this territory, Soviet specialists could not ignore the strange object. But, having discovered many divergent tunnels, they were afraid to penetrate them at a sufficiently large distance. After all, the war is not over yet. The object could have been mined, and SS men might have taken refuge in the tunnels. But at the end of the war, Soviet units of the Northern Group of Forces were deployed in the Miedzyrzecz area. Their representatives also tried to conduct reconnaissance. However, being careful of mines, they did not show much zeal, therefore they did not achieve success. The door made of thick armor was welded with an autogen, and the Camp was forgotten.

The next attempt was made only in the 1980s. Then the Soviet military carried out engineering and sapper reconnaissance, but could not complete it. The required amount of work proved unbearable due to lack of funds. Therefore, in our days, at times only amateurs descend into the dungeon, who are even more unable to scout an object of this magnitude.

Therefore, it is not surprising that not too much is known about the "Earthworm Camp". We do not even know the true dimensions of this underground structure. It appears to be a gigantic labyrinth of many tunnels with innumerable branches radiating north, south, and west. In them, as in the subway, electrified double-track narrow-gauge railways are laid. But what the electric trains transported along them, who were their passengers, is unknown. There is evidence that the Fuhrer visited the "Earthworm Camp" twice, but for what purpose is also not clear. Presumably, the keys to many secrets of the Third Reich are located here, for example, warehouses of works of art and other treasures looted in occupied countries, not to mention stockpiles of weapons and explosives.

One of those who became interested in the "Earthworm Camp" was Colonel Alexander Liskin, at that time a military prosecutor, he visited these places in the early 1960s. At that time, the surroundings of Miedzyzhech in the area of the small settlement of Kenypitsa were impenetrable forests dotted with minefields, entangled with barbed wire and dotted with ruins of concrete fortifications. The colonel was intrigued by the stories of local residents about the forest lake Kshiva with a strange floating island in the center. On the military maps of the Third Reich, this place was marked with the name "Earthworm Camp". He stumbled upon its remnants, following the forest road to the location of one of the signal brigades of the Northern Group of Soviet Forces.

Here is how Colonel Liskin described what he saw: “About 10 minutes later, 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 engineering structure. On the other side are the ruins, probably of a mansion. On the wall, as if cutting off the road from the military camp, there are almost no traces of bullets and fragments.

It is said that two regiments, the school of the SS division “Totenkopf” and other units were based in this place. When it became clear to the Germans that they might be surrounded, the Nazis hurried to retreat. This was done literally within a few hours, although the only road that could have retreated to the west was already occupied by Soviet tanks. It was hard to imagine how and where it was possible to escape from this natural trap of almost an entire division in a few hours. Most likely, for their salvation, the Nazis took advantage of the underground tunnels laid under the camp.

Liskin also learned that near the lake, in a reinforced concrete box, an insulated exit of an underground power cable was discovered. Instruments showed that he was under a voltage of 380 volts. A concreted well was also found, into which water fell from a great height and disappeared somewhere in the bowels of the earth. Presumably, there is a hidden power plant, the turbines of which are rotated by this water. It was said that the lake was somehow connected to the surrounding water bodies, and there are many of them. However, the sappers who found the cable and the well could not solve this riddle.

The colonel managed to explore the shores of the lake by boat, because it was impossible to do this by land. On the eastern shore, he saw several man-made hills that looked like waste heaps. Rumor has it that inside they are riddled with secret passages and manholes. Liskin also drew attention to small puddles. The sappers were sure that these were traces of flooded entrances to the dungeon. But of particular interest was an island in the middle of the lake, overgrown with firs and willows. Its area was no more than 50 square meters. He moved slowly across the water surface, but did not sail far. It seemed that the island was slowly drifting, as if at anchor.

Liskin also examined the entrance to the tunnel disguised as a hill discovered by the sappers and came to the following conclusion: “Already in the first approximation, it became clear that this was a serious structure, moreover, probably with various kinds of traps, including mines.” The sappers told him that somehow a tipsy foreman decided to take a bike ride through the mysterious tunnel on a bet, and never returned. The military ventured to go through the tunnel for 10 kilometers and found several previously unknown entrances.

Later, other groups of military men descended into the labyrinth. They found railway tracks, cables for power supply, many branches, and bricked up, and much more. According to Captain Cherepanov, who visited the Lair, "it was man-made, which is an excellent implementation of engineering." It had everything you need for an autonomous life for many years. Cherepanov with a group of military men descended into the dungeon through the pillbox along steel spiral staircases. By the light of acid lamps, they entered the underground subway. “It was exactly the subway, since a railway track was laid along the bottom of the tunnel. The ceiling was without signs of soot. The walls are neatly lined with cables.

As you can see, the locomotive was driven by electric power here ... 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 found an underground crematorium. “Perhaps it was in his furnaces that the remains of the dungeon builders were burned,” said Cherepanov.

It became known that both the height and the width of the underground metro shaft are approximately three meters. Its walls and ceiling are made of reinforced concrete slabs, the floor is lined with rectangular stone slabs. The neck smoothly lowers and dives underground to a depth of 50 meters. Here the tunnels branch and intersect, there are transport interchanges. The main highway ran in a westerly direction. Therefore, it was suggested that, perhaps, it passes under the Oder. After all, it is only 60 km from Kenyiiitsy. Where she goes next and where her final station - it was hard to even imagine. Perhaps the labyrinth was connected with the plant and strategic underground storage facilities located in the area of the villages of Vysoka and Peski, which are located two to five kilometers west and north of Lake Kshiva.

It is interesting that at its bottom in clear weather it is possible to see something that looks like a hatch. It is called the "eye of hell". Probably, the hatch was made so that the labyrinth could be flooded if necessary, and very quickly. But if the hatch is closed to this day, it means that it was not used in January 1945. Therefore, it can be assumed that the underground city was not flooded, but only "mothballed until a special occasion." What do its horizons and labyrinths store and what await?

According to the testimony of the former chief of staff of the brigade, Colonel P. N. Kabanov, soon after the first survey of the camp, the commander of the Northern Group of Forces, Colonel-General P. S. Maryakhin, who personally descended into the underground metro, specially arrived in Kenyiitsu. After his visit and numerous examinations by specialists, the military began to develop a new vision of this military mystery, unusual in its scale. According to the engineering and sapper report, 44 km of underground utilities were discovered and examined.

The history of the creation of the underground city was well known by a resident of Miedzyrzech, Dr. Podbelsky, who was about 90 years old in the 1980s. This passionate local historian in the late 1940s and early 1950s, alone, at his own peril and risk, repeatedly descended underground through the discovered hole. He said that the construction of the camp had been especially active since 1933. And in 1937, Hitler himself came here from Berlin, and - the most curious thing - he allegedly arrived on the rails of a secret subway. In fact, since that time, the underground city was considered handed over to the use of the Wehrmacht and the SS.

Many wartime objects have been preserved on the surface, around the lake. Among them are the ruins of a rifle complex and a hospital for elite SS troops. All of them were built of reinforced concrete and refractory bricks. But the main objects are powerful pillboxes. Once upon a time, their reinforced concrete and steel domes were armed with heavy machine guns and cannons, equipped with semi-automatic ammunition supply mechanisms.

Under the meter-long armor of these caps, underground floors went to a depth of up to 30–50 m, in which there were sleeping and amenity premises, ammunition and food depots, and communication centers. The approaches to the pillboxes were securely covered by minefields, ditches, concrete gouges, barbed wire and engineering traps. A bridge led from the armored door inside the pillbox, which, if necessary, could topple under the feet of the uninitiated, and they would inevitably collapse into a deep concrete well under it.

Obviously, the exploration of the "Earthworm Camp" labyrinth, this "road to hell", is capable of presenting many more surprises. But this requires large funds. Most likely, neither Poland, nor Germany, nor Russia wants to spend them. In addition, there are certainly reasons of a strategic nature. And small and poorly equipped groups of amateur researchers are not able to carry out serious intelligence.

This gives rise to claims that the labyrinth stretches all the way to Berlin, that it is one of the sites where the Nazis tried to create atomic weapons, and its tunnels contain the treasures of the Third Reich, looted around the world. Some researchers believe that it is in the labyrinths of the "Earthworm Camp" that the famous "Amber Room" is hidden. It is likely that some documentary traces have been preserved in the archives of Germany, and perhaps evidence of the builders and users of this military engineering phenomenon, but so far nothing is known about them ...

An interesting article about the dungeons of the Third Reich

Legends have been circulating about this area, circulating and will continue to circulate for a long time, one darker than the other.

“Let's start with,” says one of the pioneers of the local catacombs, Colonel Alexander Liskin, “that near a forest lake, in a reinforced concrete box, an insulated outlet of an underground power cable was discovered, instrumental measurements on the cores of which showed the presence of industrial current with a voltage of 380 volts. Soon the attention of the sappers was attracted by a concrete well, which swallowed water falling from a height. At the same time, intelligence reported that, perhaps, underground power communication was coming from the direction of Miedzyrzecz. However, the presence of a hidden autonomous power plant, and also the fact that its turbines were rotated by water falling into a well, were not excluded. It was said that the lake was somehow connected to the surrounding water bodies, and there are many of them here.

Whatever they say, one thing is indisputable: there is no more extensive and more branched underground fortified area in the world than the one that was dug in the Varta-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, marveled at the length of the tunnels and left. No one wanted to get lost, explode, disappear into giant concrete catacombs that stretched tens (!) kilometers to the north, south and west. No one could say for what purpose double-track narrow-gauge railways were laid in them, where and why electric trains ran through endless tunnels with countless branches, dead ends, what they transported on their platforms, who was a passenger. However, it is known for certain that Hitler at least twice visited this underground reinforced concrete kingdom, coded under the name "RL" - Regenwurmlager - "Earthworm Camp".

What for?

A local old-timer - a former tanker, and now a taxi driver named Jozef, took with him a fluorescent lamp, 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”, “Berta”. The closest to Miedzyrzech is “Henrik”. Our guide claims that it was to his platform that Hitler arrived from Berlin in order to go from here already 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. Yes, and to the "Wolf's Lair" from here just a few hours away by car.

Jozef drives his Polonaise down the 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 defensive system of the Pomor Wall. 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 the lakes, storks on the roofs, pine forests burning from the inside with the sun, roe deer roam.

WELCOME TO HELL!

A picturesque hill with an old oak tree on top was crowned with two steel armored caps. Their massive, smoothed, slotted cylinders looked like Teutonic knightly helmets, "forgotten" under the shadow of an oak crown.
The western slope of the hill was cut off by a concrete wall one and a half human height, into which an armored hermetic door was cut into a third of an ordinary door and several air intake holes, again taken away by armored shutters. They were the gills of an underground monster. Above the entrance is an inscription sprayed from a spray can with paint: “Welcome to hell!” - "Welcome to Hell!"

Under the close 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 swings open easily, and another loophole looks into your chest - a frontal battle. “Entered without a pass - get an automatic burst,” her blank, unblinking gaze says. This is the chamber of the entrance vestibule. Once upon a time, its floor treacherously failed, and an intruder 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 in a checkpoint, where the guard once checked the documents of all incoming people and held the entrance pressure door at gunpoint. Only after that you can enter the corridor leading to the combat casemates, covered with armored domes. One of them still has a rusty rapid-fire grenade launcher, another housed a flamethrower, the third housed a heavy machine gun. camouflaged emergency exit.

One floor below - warehouses of consumable ammunition, a tank with fire mixture, an entrance trap chamber, it is also a punishment cell, a sleeping compartment for a shift on duty, a filter-ventilation enclosure ... Here is the entrance to the underworld: wide - four meters in diameter - a concrete well plummets down to a depth of a ten-story Houses. The beam of the lantern highlights the water at the bottom of the mine. A concrete staircase descends along the shaft in steep narrow flights.

“There are one hundred and fifty steps,” says Jozef. We follow him with bated breath: what is below? And below, at a depth of 45 meters, there is a high-arched hall, similar to the nave of an old cathedral, except that it was assembled from arched reinforced concrete. The shaft, along which the staircase wound, breaks off here in order to continue even deeper, but already like a well filled almost to the brim with water. Does it have a bottom? And why does the shaft hanging over it rise up to the casemate floor? Joseph doesn't know. But he leads us to another well, narrower, covered with a manhole cover. This is a source of drinking water. Might as well grab it now.

I look around the arches of the local Hades. What did they see, what was happening under 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 channel. They housed two barracks for a hundred people, an infirmary, a kitchen, warehouses with food and ammunition, a power plant, and a fuel storage. Carriage trains also rolled up here through the airlock gas chamber along the branch line leading to the main tunnel to the Henrik station.

Shall we go to the station? our guide asks.

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

Only then I notice how cold it is in this cold underground: the temperature here is constant, both in summer and in winter - 10oC. At the thought, under what thickness of the earth our gap-path stretches, it becomes completely uncomfortable. The low arch and narrow walls compress the soul - will we get out of here? And if the concrete ceiling collapses, and if water gushes? After all, for more than half a century, all these structures have not known any maintenance or repair, they are holding back, and yet they are holding back both the pressure of the bowels and the pressure of water ...

When the phrase “Maybe we’ll return?” was already spinning on the tip of the tongue, the narrow passage finally merged into a wide transport tunnel. Concrete slabs made up a kind of platform here. This was the station "Henrik" - abandoned, dusty, dark ... I immediately remembered those stations of the Berlin metro that, until recently, were in a similar desolation, because they were under the wall that cut Berlin into eastern and western parts. They could be seen from the windows of the blue express trains - these caverns of time frozen for half a century ... Now, standing on the Henrik platform, it was not difficult to believe that the rails of this rusty double-track reached the Berlin metro.

We turn to the side. Soon, puddles sloshed underfoot, and drainage ditches stretched along the edges of the footpath - ideal drinkers for bats. The beam of the lantern jumped upwards, and above our heads moved a large living bunch, molded from bone-winged half-birds, half-animals. Cold goosebumps ran down the back - what a dirty trick, however! For nothing that is useful - eats mosquitoes.

Get out, get out of here, and as soon as possible!

OUR TANK - OVER THE BUNKER
To the question “why the Mezeritsky fortified area was 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 for thousands of miles from the invasion of nomads. The Germans did almost the same, erecting the East Wall - Ostwall, with the only difference that they laid their "wall" underground. They began to build it back in 1927, and only ten years later they completed the first stage. Believing to sit behind this "impregnable" shaft, the Nazi strategists moved from here, first to Warsaw, and then to Moscow, leaving captured Paris in the rear. The outcome of the great campaign to the east is known. The onslaught of the Soviet armies was not helped to hold back either by anti-tank "dragon's teeth", or armored domes, or underground forts with all their medieval traps and the most modern weapons.

In the winter of the forty-fifth, the fighters of Colonel Gusakovsky broke through this “impassable” line and moved directly to the Oder. Here, near Miedzyrzech, the tank battalion of Major Karabanov, who burned down in his tank, fought with the "Dead Head". No extremists dared to break the monument to our fighters near the village of Kalava. It is silently guarded by the memorial "thirty-four", even though now it has remained in the rear of NATO. Its cannon looks to the west - at the armored domes of the Scharnhorst bunker. The old tank went into a deep raid of historical memory. At night, bats circle over 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, again became Poland.

What is hidden in the dungeons of the former Nazi secret factory, recently discovered in Austria? Maybe laboratories for the manufacture of atomic weapons?

In an underground tunnel. Photo: ZDF

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

Austrian find

These secret underground factories are one of the Nazis' most ambitious projects. Work on the creation of a new “wonder 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 code-named Bergkristall (“Rock Crystal”). The total area of its mines and adits is, presumably, almost 300 thousand square meters. At the end of 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 Sankt Georg an der Gusen, about 20 kilometers from Linz.

What secrets are hidden in this dungeon? Photo: ZDF

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

Construction prisoners

According to some experts, 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 and 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 Messerschmitt ME262 turbojet military aircraft were produced.

According to documents found during archival research, the 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 Saxlehner(Johannes Sachslehner), whose findings are cited by the weekly Spiegel, 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 ill-treatment. In total, the number of those who died on the construction of Nazi underground factories amounted to about 320 thousand people, scientists believe.

Without documentation

By order of the Austrian authorities after the Second World War, most of the Nazi underground tunnels (in any case, the entrances to them) were filled with concrete or clogged with earth. But a number of labyrinths were simply freed from the 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 equipment and grow champignons.

Most of the labyrinths are walled up. Photo: ZDF

But over time, water began to seep through the arches 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). AT total we are talking about about 150 tunnels. It is not clear what to do with them. Even just using these land plots for residential or office development is dangerous: the risk of landslides is too high.

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

Portal for the student. Self-training

Austrian find

Construction prisoners

Without documentation

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