It was one of the largest and most ambitious projects in human history. In 1944, architects, engineers and specialists from the combat design bureaus of the Third Reich began building an extensive system of gigantic underground structures both in Germany and on the territory of the occupied countries, which was supposed to reliably shelter German factories and factories from air strikes and turn secret laboratories into the creation of the latest types of weapons in impregnable underground fortresses. In inhuman conditions, hundreds of thousands of forced laborers and prisoners of concentration camps, until the very last days of the Second World War, worked on laying many kilometers of labyrinths, which were supposed to ensure the smooth operation of the Nazi war machine.

Hitler's underground shelter, the first jet planes, the super-cannon and the infamous V-2 rockets, the mass production of nerve gas and the storehouse of priceless treasures looted in Europe - these are just a small part of the still not fully explored world of the Underground Reich, which tells this documentary.

Movie 1st

The underground factories of the Third Reich have become one of the most ambitious projects in the history of mankind. A new miracle weapon was created here, designed to deliver a mortal blow to the enemies of Germany. Hundreds of thousands of people worked on the construction of the tunnels. How many of them died is unknown. Work in the dungeon was in full swing until the last day of the war. How close were the Nazis to carrying out their plans? What would happen if they managed to establish an underground production of a miracle weapon? How many more lives would this war of annihilation take?

Hans Rabe is responsible for the underground tunnel system located in South and East Germany. He regularly checks the safety of structures built 60 years ago.

“During the war, the plant belonged to the Messerschmitt company. Aircraft were built here. Judging by the drawings, three or four entrances led here, one was opened. The rest were blown up at the end of the war. Two parallel tunnels 80-90 meters long connect the cross passages. This is where the factory was located.

The Nazi leadership did not immediately decide to implement this ambitious plan. The order to transfer industrial facilities underground was given by the Minister of Armaments Albert Speer in the summer of 1943, when Allied aircraft began to inflict significant damage on military plants. German industrialists did not immediately support this project, although the state assumed the huge costs of its implementation. In their opinion, the project looked unfinished. At first, the Nazis only deepened the old mines.

One of the first at the end of the 43rd year, an object was built under the code name "Neustadt" on the banks of the Neckar River. Here, at a depth of 120 m, lies a giant system of underground tunnels.

For a century and a half before the First World War, gypsum was mined here, then dynamite was produced here, and after 1937 ammunition was stored. Iron gates lead to the underground city. The plant was supposed to occupy an area of ​​130 thousand square meters. meters. Part of the production capacity was already operational in the spring of 1944.

Holger Glatz, lieutenant colonel:“During the war, one of the workshops for the production of ammunition was transferred here, as well as a ball bearing factory from Schweinfurt. The underground complex was expanded in 1957, at the height of the Cold War. The task was to secure production and equipment from nuclear bombardment.”

Today, 720 people work underground here, producing ammunition and spare parts for the army. The maintenance of this plant costs the German Ministry of Defense 1.5 million euros annually. Production is deployed in the same tunnels as 60 years ago.

The most important objects were masked so as to hide them from reconnaissance aircraft. The Nazis have been moving huge fuel tanks underground since the mid-1930s. One of these reservoirs, located near Bremen, is still in use today.

Specially trained people are employed in the maintenance of these underground structures. Only they have access underground. Each of the 8 giant tanks with a volume of 4 thousand cubic meters is made of 12 mm ship steel, and the thickness of the concrete casing reaches one meter.

1944 propaganda film:“The enemy’s attempt to destroy the German military industry with systematic air raids failed. The main factories for the production of equipment and ammunition were transferred underground in advance with German thoroughness.

This propaganda film "Arms, Hands, Hearts" contains rare footage of underground facilities under construction in Kala, Thuringia. An aircraft factory was supposed to start operating here, codenamed "Lachs" (Lachs), translated from German - "Salmon". Prisoners of war and those who were forcibly driven from the territories occupied by Germany worked underground in hellish conditions.

“On the first day we were divided into groups. The German officer told us: “You will work until you die!”. Three people drilled a hole in the tunnels, three more raked debris, and one drove a wheelbarrow. We stood on the scaffolding and drilled huge holes in the ceiling, 3 meters deep - dynamite was laid there. Then it was blown up. We were forced to immediately rake up the wreckage. Because of the dust and smoke, we could not see each other, but it was impossible to stop - the Nazis were ruthless.

After a grueling 12-hour shift, tens of thousands of workers received meager rations. From the beginning of February 1945, teenagers aged 14-16 began to be involved in the work.

1944 propaganda film:“The leadership of the country declares that the sky of Germany must be recaptured, and it will be recaptured! Our inventors and designers will oppose enemy bomber squadrons with a new aircraft that knows no equal in air combat.

The production of the ME-262 jet fighter, one of the most secret developments of the Luftwaffe, was transferred to Qala. The first plane was ready to take off in mid-February of the 45th year.

Paul Baert, former worker at the Lachs facility:“The shape of the ME-262 fighter resembled a fish: ultra-modern, with a very narrow fuselage and, apparently, very fast. There were rumors that it was planned to produce 1200 fighters per month. It was hard to believe. It seemed impossible. We were horrified by what was happening. It was clear to us that if the war dragged on, we simply would not survive.”

This aerial photograph of the Qala region was taken from an American aircraft in 1945. The fortified entrances and the cargo lift on the side of the mountain are clearly visible.

Hans Rabe, mine operation expert:“We are in one of the huge halls of the ME-262 jet fighter assembly plant. Here was a section from where the already finished aircraft was delivered to the surface through this tunnel, then it climbed up the mountainside on a lift, and from there it took off.

The runway was built on the crest of the mountain. In fact, not many aircraft took off from here - the launch of jet aircraft into mass production took time.

Herbert Römer, former worker at the Lachs facility:“I remember two takeoffs of ME-262 fighters. We worked at the top, from where you can see both the lift and what is happening in the air. Someone pointed to the horizon: we all looked up and saw this strange plane flying at an incredible speed. It really looked like a new miracle weapon!

Until the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners were transported to Germany to build new aircraft factories. Max Mannheimer was transferred in February 1945 from Auschwitz to a town in Mühldorf, a town near the Inn River.

Max Mannheimer, former concentration camp prisoner:“We knew that an underground plant would be built here. And we also knew that it was caused by the regular bombing of military factories. They decided to hide everything underground. Here, for example, there should have been six floors, three of them underground. It reminded me of the construction of the pyramids in ancient Egypt. Thousands of people scurried back and forth, urged on by overseers who were in a hurry to complete the work as quickly as possible. Basically, I had to dig, carry iron and concrete. The last one was the hardest and scariest. Doctors from the SS calculated that a person in such a job could last 60-80 days at the most. And this calculation turned out to be quite accurate.

When the war ended, Max Mannheimer weighed 37 kg. Many of those who worked alongside him did not live to see his release. Their bodies were taken from Mühldorf and other camps to Dachau. Photos of both the dead and the survivors shocked the whole world.

Northeast of Nuremberg in the forest behind a concrete wall is another entrance to the tunnel. Mining engineers opened it to carry out planned work. The Dogerwerk (?) near Jarusbrook (?) is one of the largest underground structures built by the Nazis. Even today, villagers in the vicinity of the Franconian Alba are unaware of the true dimensions of the mysterious network of rock tunnels. The partially lined tunnels appear to have never been used.

Hans Rabe, mine operation expert:“Now we are leaving the lined sections of the tunnel and moving into the unlined ones. As you can see, sandstone is everywhere here, and there are no supports. The worst thing that can happen is the collapse of blocks of sandstone, which is likely to cause subsidence of the rock, noticeable even on the surface.

The Nazis gave this structure the code name "Eidechse-1", in translation - "lizard".

Hans Rabe, mine operation expert:“Now we are going to the main roadway - to the place where it was planned to carry out construction work. See those black holes? These are ready-made holes for explosives. If you're lucky, you can find packages with explosives in them. Or drills like this stuck in the rock. And here is one of the explosives. Everything was ready to be blown up, but the work was suddenly stopped, and everything was abandoned. Of the planned 100 thousand square meters. meters built only 15 thousand. Judging by the drifts, work should have continued in this direction. Production shops were going to be placed in these galleries. Construction began in March 1944 and continued until May 1945. They managed to dig about 7.5 km of tunnels and only one tenth of them were lined with cement. It was supposed to assemble BMW aircraft engines here. The entire plant was to be moved underground.”

Half a million cubic meters of sandstone were blown up and removed. However, the production of engines for aircraft has not been established here. By order of the American occupying forces, the entrances to the tunnel were fenced off after the war, and the abandoned factory was soon forgotten.

Only sometimes former prisoners come here to honor the memory of their fallen comrades.

By the end of the war, Hitler had high hopes for a new type of weapon that could change the course of the war. The V-2 ballistic missile in the Third Reich was called a weapon of retaliation. Its creator, Wernher von Braun, worked on the project in Peenemünde. The rocket was ready for serial production.

The Nazis planned to use it for attacks on the territory of England. V-2, it seemed, could keep the British in constant fear. Trial launches were unsuccessful, but by the summer of 1944, the V-2 rockets were ready for use.

An unremarkable mountain range in the Harz region. In mid-April 45, the Americans occupied the town of Nordhausen. On the slope of Mount Kokshtein, they discovered a concentration camp, and there are many emaciated prisoners and a huge number of corpses.

Those who managed to survive in the Mittelbau-Dora camp told their liberators about mysterious rock tunnels and a top-secret rocket factory.

“10,000 prisoners were herded into four adjacent rooms in the tunnel system. They slept where they worked. Despite the cold and high humidity, the workers wore only striped robes. This, of course, led to epidemic diseases. Of the 3,000 who died in the first 5 months, most died of tuberculosis and other lung diseases. The rest died of exhaustion, starvation, cold and abuse."

“We were prisoners in the Nordhausen camp. Every morning the train took us to the tunnel. We were called suicide bombers. It was much easier to work upstairs than in the dungeon, if that's even the case. Inside, we were under constant surveillance by the SS. We were constantly beaten. Those who worked before us did not even see the light of day. They never rose to the surface - they slept, ate and worked underground. The conditions were hellish and the brutality of the SS was indescribable. A lot of people died there."

The Ministry of Armaments allocated 200 million Reichsmarks for the construction of a huge underground industrial facility with a total area of ​​600 thousand square meters. m. The purpose of this construction was the production of rockets FAA. It was planned to produce 1 thousand missiles per month. However, by April 44, due to production failures, it was barely possible to fulfill half of the plan.

Jens-Christian Wagner, employee of the Mittelbau-Dora memorial complex:“It was an unusual plant in the sense that its products were not ready to go into mass production. Almost daily from Peenemünde, where the design office was located, instructions came to change technologies, which were immediately introduced into production. As a result, more than half of the missiles were structurally unfinished.”

Rare color footage shot by Hitler's personal cameraman Walter Frentz. Following the instructions of German technicians, specially selected prisoners assemble rockets from 45,000 parts. Ready V-2s were delivered to tunnel No. 41 for final checks.

The 15m test area is almost completely flooded today. Here the rockets were loaded onto trains that carried them to launch sites in northern Germany and occupied Holland.

Jens-Christian Wagner, employee of the Mittelbau-Dora memorial complex:“The Allies had complete and detailed information about what was happening here, mainly due to the analysis of aerial photographs. For example, they pinpointed the location of the ventilation shafts in Kokstein and seriously considered dropping phosphorus or other incendiary bombs into the shafts to destroy the plant.”

Filming made by an American cameraman on April 12, 1945. On this day, all the horror of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp was revealed to the Allies. After the British aircraft bombed the death camp in Boelk (?), emaciated prisoners were brought here.

Peter Wolf, former concentration camp prisoner:“You gradually get used to the sight of dead bodies. Every morning each block had to line up for roll call. Everyone was counted, even those who died at night. We had to put the bodies aside. You were already glad that you survived another day. I am often asked: "Why didn't you resist the SS?". I always answer: “We only did what we resisted, staying alive.”

News release, 1944:“We present the first shooting of the V-2 rocket on the territory of England. For reasons of secrecy, it was taken from a great distance and gives only a vague idea of ​​the true size of the V-2. At colossal speed, its narrow steel hull rises into the stratosphere."
London became the main target for German missiles. On September 7, 1944, the first V-2 exploded in the center of the British capital.

Joseph Goebbels, 1944:“After the devastating raids on the capital of the Reich - Berlin - I promised that the hour would come and we would take revenge on the British. The English press attacked me furiously, inquiring caustically: "Wasn't the new weapon of which I spoke invented in the Ministry of Propaganda, and not in the Ministry of Armaments?" But I did not consider it necessary to argue with them. On the contrary, I was convinced that the longer they did not believe in the existence of weapons, the better, for surprise is also a weapon!

The original plan was to launch FAA rockets from giant launch bunkers. In May 1943, in the town of Watten in northern France, construction began on a huge concrete structure measuring 40 x 75 m. German engineers were sure that the 5-meter-thick reinforced concrete roof would be impenetrable. British bombers proved otherwise in the summer of 1944. The unfinished launch base was badly damaged by bombardment and became unusable for launching FAA missiles.

As conceived by Wernher von Braun, new missiles were to be launched from mobile installations. These launch sites were easily camouflaged, and it was difficult to find and destroy such targets from the air.

“Yes, we knew how dangerous these missiles were, especially the V-2, which were launched from French territory and hit a target in England. It was really scary. And for people who had more extensive information, for Churchill, for example, it was doubly scary, because he had to maintain the morale of the nation. For us, it was just a job. We realized its importance, but did not think about the far-reaching consequences.

RAF No. 617 "Dambusters" Squadron stepped in whenever British military intelligence discovered military targets such as FAA missile launch pads.

The northern French town of Isère is probably the most impressive underground bunker built by the Nazis to launch weapons of retaliation. The locals call the gigantic roof of this building La Coupole (The Dome). The storage was designed for 500 missiles. Thousands of prisoners in unbearable conditions punched kilometers of tunnels in the rock.

The concrete dome, 5 meters thick, weighed 55,000 tons. It was supposed to form a protective vault over the very heart of the structure. Here, the missiles had to be brought to a vertical position for the final assembly and installation of warheads. Excavation work has already begun on the inside. The height of the octagonal hall was 13 meters. But soon after the start of construction, the British learned about the plant and the aircraft of the Dambusters squadron were ordered to destroy it.

Bob Knight, RAF:“It is very important that we managed to blow up the plant before it was ready to launch missiles. We were instructed in detail and told everything we knew about him. The idea was to blow up targets from the inside. We achieved a double effect: with a direct hit, everything shattered to pieces, but at the same time, the bombs also penetrated into the depths of the structure.

British designers have specially developed for this purpose a 5-ton Tallboy bomb, capable of penetrating 5-meter layers of concrete. On July 17, 1944, such bombs were dropped on Isère.

Bob Knight, RAF:“We received the data as soon as the reconnaissance aircraft returned. They flew to the place almost instantly, took aerial photography, and - back. And we were told by radio how successful the raid was, and whether a second flight was needed. With such bombs, re-sorties were usually not required, unless we missed.

Eleven days earlier, Dambusters had bombed Mimoyek, a small village just a few kilometers from the shore of the strait, south of Calais. By order of the Nazi Minister of Armaments Speer, the construction of an underground plant for the production of weapons began here back in 1943, capable, like the V-2, of directly hitting London. A single Tallboy bomb was enough to dispel Hitler's dream of a so-called English cannon. The bomb pierced the 6-meter concrete roof and exploded inside the mountain.

By this time, the prisoners had already managed to lay 100-meter diagonal battery shafts in the rock for the Hardworking Lizhen - that was the name of the FAU-3. The range of these guns reached 200 km. It is not completely clear what kind of shells were supposed to be used in these miracle guns. It is possible that they could be equipped with biological or chemical charges.

V-3s posed such a danger to England that Prime Minister Winston Churchill remembered the "Hardworking Lizhen" even 8 months after the liberation of France. “I cannot allow this facility to threaten the security of the country,” he said in a secret memo. As a result, the mines for the V-3, which survived the bombing, were blown up by British sappers.

An abandoned railway line leads to the desert area of ​​Falkenhagen, southeast of Berlin. British intelligence materials relating to this place in the Brandenburg region are still partially classified. It was supposed to produce one of the deadliest types of weapons of mass destruction.

Campaign film, 1944:“By gas, we mean those chemical products that can be used as a chemical weapon during a battle with the aim of influencing the enemy and incapacitating him. Chemicals were an effective weapon already in World War I. Therefore, it is likely that the enemy will use them in this war as well. And we have to be constantly ready.”

Training film of the Wehrmacht. The effect of toxic substances of mustard gas and hydrocyanic acid on living beings is demonstrated.

Dr. Hofmann, a physicist and former member of the GDR Academy of Sciences, has spent decades studying the history of Falkenhagen. The facility, codenamed Zeiverg, was built by the military in 1938 in a dense forest that protected it from prying eyes. Here they worked mainly on the creation of incendiary substances. The unfinished buildings are part of a project that began here in 1944. The high military command transferred these territories to the IJ Farmer concern. The chemical concern was supposed to develop a completely new chemical weapon.

Dr. Hofmann, local historian:“At the time, the latest development was the nerve gas sarin. This poisonous substance had to be produced in a large plant here in Falkenhagen. Sarin mainly affects the respiratory system. One drop of it per 1 cu. m of air is enough for death from asphyxiation to occur within 6 minutes upon contact with the substance. After the war, people were shocked by the destructive potential of the weapons developed here. This poisonous substance was a purely German invention, completely unknown to the Allies. 500 tons per month is a big volume. And with the help of shells and bombs, it was possible to devastate entire areas. With such weapons, it is impossible to divide potential victims into military and civilian populations.”

An 80-meter underground chute is all that remains of an unfinished Sarin plant. The management of the concern stated that production could begin as early as the summer of 1945.

But in early May 1945, American tank units entered Austria. And the pitiful remnants of the Wehrmacht surrendered to the superior forces of the Allies.

Filming near Salzburg, made at the end of the war by a cameraman from the United States of America. On May 8, two days after the liberation of the Ebensee concentration camp, war correspondents captured on film the workers who managed to survive.

Camp inmates and people brought in from Ebensee worked in a secret tunnel system located near the camp, codenamed "Cement". The halls in which intercontinental missiles were to be assembled under the leadership of SS Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler have a height of up to 30 meters. The latest model of the rocket, the 26-meter A-9, in accordance with the ambitious plans of the Nazis, was to have a radius of destruction that could destroy targets in the United States. Ebensee intended to produce 20 of these missiles per month. But the work on the A-9 project was not carried out even before the testing stage. After the end of the war, project manager Wernher von Braun was taken to the United States of America, where he continued to work on his rocket program for new owners. The exact number of victims of his activities in the service of Hitler is still not known.

Movie 2nd

At the end of World War II, the Allies discovered gigantic unfinished tunnel systems in Germany. It is believed that even Hitler did not know about some of them.

Allied aviation tried to destroy these underground structures with bombs specially designed for this purpose. However, some of these tunnels still look like the war here ended just yesterday. The crazy project of building underground factories has sunk into oblivion along with the Third Reich.

Hitler's underground headquarters was located in the Alps in the Obersalzberg area. Until now, this structure has not been fully explored.

From the residence of the Fuhrer "Berghoff" there were only catacombs - the Allied bombs razed it to the ground.

Eulengebirge is a region of the former Lower Silesia. Here, not far from the Polish town of Glushice, among the mountain ranges, perhaps the most mysterious legacy of the Third Reich is hidden.

Jacek Duszak, a Polish teacher, and Jurgen Müller, from the Berlin Underground Association, have been doing their research here for many years. The gigantic oak-panelled hall shows that the Nazis planned to build something grand here.

“In total, there are seven underground tunnel systems, only 1/8 of which was concreted. In the rest of the tunnels, in some places there are supporting structures made of beams and tree trunks. More than 40 thousand people worked on the construction. The prisoners worked 10-12 hours a day at a temperature not exceeding 8 degrees. The food was very poor. Naturally, many died.

When the Soviet troops entered Lower Silesia at the end of April 1945, they found only a gigantic abandoned construction site. At first, no one understood what exactly was being built here.

Jacek Duszak, local historian:“After the end of the war, the entrance to the bunker was never closed. Those who visited there after the Germans left said that everything looked as if the workers had just left for lunch. Drills protruded from the walls, shovels were scattered everywhere, there were wheelbarrows and dump trucks with rubble. It seemed that the workers were about to return.”

Concrete shelters for guards and fortified machine gun nests confirm the importance of this structure. In an atmosphere of the strictest secrecy, a new headquarters for the Fuhrer was being built here since November 43rd. The structure was given the code name "Rize" ("Giant").

Most of the workers were transferred here from the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. At the beginning of the 45th year, there were about 75 thousand prisoners in the camp. About 12,000, mostly Jews from Auschwitz, were brought to the makeshift camps of the Eulengebirge. Approximately half of them died during construction.

Workers dug 3 km of tunnels in the Wolfsberg mountain range. The largest complex of structures of the Rize object was supposed to be located here. Today, part of the intricate systems and tunnels are flooded with water.

Jacek Duszak, local historian:“According to some reports, most of the prisoners were evacuated at the end of the war. A small group was left here to mask the structure. These people disappeared without a trace, as did the guards. Of course, all this is unconfirmed information. The Nazis had plenty of time to cover their tracks. Today, it is very difficult to find walled-up entrances - they were carefully filled in, and now trees have already grown in this place.

Fürstenstein Castle near Waldenburg once belonged to the Princes of Plessky. In 1940, the vast estates of Churchill's relatives were nationalized.

Four years later, a global reconstruction began. This Baroque jewel was planned to be turned into a guest house for the Nazi elite. But, in fact, the castle was intended for Adolf Hitler and his inner circle.

35 architects in the strictest secrecy worked on the creation of a complex system of underground shelters.

If necessary, the elevator was supposed to deliver the Fuhrer from his apartment to a depth of 50 m. The area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe underground premises was to be 3200 square meters. m.

Jurgen Müller, Berlin Underground Association:“It was planned to move Hitler's headquarters here in case of emergency. All key figures of the Third Reich also had to have residences hidden underground. One was planned to be built for Goebbels, another for Himmler, and so on. Of course, the highest ranks of the Wehrmacht, such as Keitel and Yogel, also had to move here. The project stipulated the number of cubic meters due to each.

A surviving newsreel fragment captured Hitler's farewell to Benito Mussolini in the Wolf's Lair near Rastenburg in the summer of 1944. The Fuhrer's headquarters in East Prussia occupied an area of ​​250 hectares. Reinforced security surrounded her with three cordon rings.

The railroad, which the Allies of the Third Reich used to visit Hitler at his headquarters, is now overgrown. The former "Wolf's Lair" is now just a heap of stones. Before retreating, the Germans blew up all the buildings. Hitler's personal hideout turned into a heap of ruins.

Rochus Misch has not been in Rastenburg since the end of 1944. He served in Hitler's personal bodyguard and was almost always next to him in the Wolf's Lair. 60 years later, it is already difficult for him to recognize anything in these ruins.

“What a massive building. Previously, buildings were no higher than 2-3 meters, but now everything is so huge. How things have changed here. I clearly remember what it looked like before. Time has flown by so quickly! Just unbelieveble. Incredible. The entire complex was rebuilt in just a few weeks. Before that, there were only flat huts. There was a passage here that led to a large room with a long table, meetings were held there. And here it was quite crowded, everything was small. Huge structures appeared later.”

When, in mid-July 1944, Hitler and his retinue moved to a new headquarters in East Prussia from Berchtesgaden, his personal bunker was not yet completed. The Fuhrer was placed in guest rooms. The meetings were held in a nearby wooden building.

On July 20, 1944, Hitler listened to the reports of his generals. There were adjutants and servants in the room. At about 12:44 p.m., the commander-in-chief bent over the table, examining a large map. At that moment there was an explosion.

A bomb exploded, which Colonel von Staufenberg hid under the table. Four people were killed, seven were seriously injured, and the building was almost completely destroyed. Hitler was saved by a massive table. That same night, all the conspirators were captured in Berlin.

“He never showed fear, we never saw him scared. He always said, "I'll be all right, nothing will happen to me." After the assassination attempt on July 20, nothing has changed. Everything was like before the explosion. Mussolini was received here, and then other people, as if nothing had happened.

Only Hitler's closest aides knew about the construction of a gigantic underground headquarters in Lower Silesia. The Fuhrer hoped that the Rize bunker would soon be completed, and there it would be practically inaccessible to enemies.

At that time, Hitler rarely visited Berlin. The British and Americans bombed the capital of the Reich daily. Despite the impending defeat, in the 44th year, the Germans still believed in their Fuhrer.

In all major cities in Germany, bomb shelters were built to protect the population. Probably the largest surviving one is in Dortmund.

“Here is a feature characteristic of such structures: these air locks were equipped with special doors. It was possible to create an increased pressure in the shelter so that in the event of a gas attack, poisonous gas would not enter here.

After the first serious Allied raid on Dortmund, it turned out that public air raid shelters were not effective and did not provide sufficient protection. As a result, the construction of a gigantic system of tunnels began under the city.

Ulrich Rekinger, city building committee:“There was supposed to be a tunnel leading to the exit from the shelter. It was dug from below, moving from cover to the surface. As you can see, the work has not been completed. This stone was left after blasting, it has been lying here for 60 years. The building was abandoned at the very end of the war. We have invoices from April 1945, which confirm that the work has not yet stopped. You can make sure that the tools are laid out as if they had just been thrown."

80 thousand people could take shelter from bombs in shelters at a depth of up to 16 meters. 5 km of tunnels were built. The shelters were never used. Only a few in Dortmund know how deeply the bowels of their city are dug up.

Ulrich Rekinger, city building committee:“We are entering the zone under Körnerplatz. We have an excellent drawing of the 43rd year. You can see what a completed shelter system would look like. This part would have 2 floors and would be upholstered in wood - it's warmer and less humid. It would be divided into corridors and separate rooms equipped with a ventilation system. But, as you can see, things did not come to this - in connection with the end of the war, construction ceased. Let's move on."

News release, 1944:"Berlin. One of the Sunday summer days of the 5th year of the war. You can see people in uniform everywhere. The Berlin Zoo, opened exactly 100 years ago, was severely damaged in a series of air attacks. The outdoor swimming pool at Wannsee has not lost its charm.”

On February 3, 1945, thousands of American bombers launched a devastating bombing attack on Berlin. The first bombs fell on the city center at 11:02 am.

Helga Lee:“Suddenly it became very, very quiet. Everyone felt that something had fallen into the shelter. The sound was not loud, more like a thud. Everyone was very scared, because no one knew if the shelters would hold up.”

Nina Alexander:“The bombs exploded below, where we used to be. Later we saw many corpses at this place. Luckily, we ended up on the third level of the shelter and were therefore unharmed."

The Berlin Zoo still has a disguised entrance to one of the underground German tunnels. Over the years, poisonous gases could have accumulated underground, but Dietmar Arnold from the association "Dungeons of Berlin" still decided to take a chance and go down here.

Dietmar Arnold, association "Dungeons of Berlin":“We are located at a depth of 9 meters under the Tiergarten in the western tunnel of the main intersection. It is 90 meters long, 14 meters wide and about 5 meters high. The planned North-South and West-East railways and highways were supposed to intersect here. The West-East highway was almost completed, now there are streets (?). The North-South highway remained a project. This is all that remains of these grandiose plans. This tunnel was re-opened only in the 67th year. The arch, as you can see, was restored. It has been calculated that it is cheaper to repair a structure than to fill it up.”

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was concerned that constant air raids could adversely affect the morale of the population. His employees secretly filmed these shots in Berlin.

By then, the Fascist leadership rarely appeared in public. Goebbels visited the ruins of St. Hedwig's Cathedral, demonstrating for the chronicle his determination to continue the fight.

The minister had his own private bunker under his official villa in the center of the government district. The remaining underground structures were discovered by chance during construction work in 1998.

A private photo of the Goebbels family, taken in 1943, shows how everything looked here.

“Get up. Get up and get dressed. Come on, quickly. Well, wake up…”

Magda Goebbels from the very beginning was one of Hitler's staunchest supporters. When the collapse of the Nazi regime became inevitable, she and her family committed suicide in the Fuhrerbunker. At the end of April 1945, Hitler, who was hiding in a bunker under the Reich Chancellery, could only hope for a miracle.

Rochus Misch, Hitler's bodyguard:“He prepared for suicide for almost a week, from April 22 to April 30, postponing it every day. In fact, Hitler wanted to commit suicide on the 22nd, when he released all his close associates. “I will stay here, I will not leave Berlin,” he said. Everyone else had to leave. He was ready to give up his life. The radio operator transmitted a message to the Western Allies, which said: "The Germans must defend Berlin for another 2-3 weeks." When this was reported to Hitler, he said: “We should have thought about this earlier, now the war is already lost.”

Rochus Misch, Hitler's bodyguard:“It was quiet, like in a church. Everyone spoke in whispers. Then someone shouted: “Linge! Linge! (Linge was Hitler's servant) I think it's over." Then the door opened and I looked inside. Another man came in, another door opened, and I saw Hitler. He was lying near the sofa or in an armchair - here I could be wrong. Nearby, bending her knees, lay Eva Braun.

News release, 1945: Salt mine near the village of Merkers. Here, in the last days of the war, Germany was dealt another crushing blow. In one of the tunnels, the soldiers found an unimaginable amount of paintings, jewelry, silver, currency, gold bars. Here are the masterpieces of almost all museums in Europe, such as paintings by Raphael, Rembrandt, Van Dyck. They were stored at a depth of 300 meters in a cache, which the Nazis considered reliable protection from bombs and prying eyes.

American financial experts and art historians immediately began to study the found treasures. It was established that this treasure consisted of the gold and foreign exchange reserves of the Third Reich and the collections of Berlin museums. Only a small part of the cultural property taken by the Nazis from the conquered countries was found here.

Later, many works of European art were discovered in other mines in the South of Germany and in Austria. Some values ​​have not been found so far.

Allied troops continued to develop the offensive. On April 22, 1945, American and French army units occupied Stuttgart.

Deep under the Gillesberg mountain, a bunker has been preserved - a witness to the decisive battles for Stuttgart. From here, the German command coordinated a hopeless attempt by the troops to defend the city. The liaison officers received orders that the soldiers fighting above never heard.

The premises look untouched, as if the war ended just yesterday. The safe has been broken into, the remains of gas masks are lying on the floor, the entire door is pierced by bullets - traces of the last battle of the defenders of the fascist regime.

The Allies feared that Hitler and his loyal comrades-in-arms would barricade themselves in Obersalzberg, where a reliable shelter for the Nazi leadership was prepared back in the 30s.

During the war, the Fuhrer and his retinue often came to Berchtesgaden, and whenever Hitler stopped there, he was heavily guarded.

Descent into the system of tunnels laid in the thickness of the mountain. A team of observers regularly inspects underground shelters.

Directly from the communication center of Obersalzberg, the tunnel goes down to a depth of 30 meters. No one knows exactly what is hidden there. The wooden staircase has long since collapsed. The observation team has to use a motorized lift.

At the bottom of the mine, experts hope to find an unfinished SS shelter. They discover 350 meters of dilapidated tunnels. Only the first sections are faced with brick, and the cable shafts are partially cemented. At a depth of 60 meters, researchers have to stop. Florian Bayerl is one of the most respected experts on the Obersalzberg. He began to study his story at a young age and interviewed many eyewitnesses. Bayerl knows that this mountain resembles an animal hole with an extensive system of passages. The total length of tunnels and bunkers is almost 6 km. Apparently, even more grandiose structures were planned to be built here. People worked in three shifts until the end of the war.

“In this last unexplored section of the Obersalzberg bunker was an SS hideout built at great depths under the existing tunnels. Previously, it was impossible to go down into this mine. Now digital technology allows us to create an accurate and complete map of all underground structures under the Obersalzberg. By studying archival records relating to the tunnels and comparing them with eyewitness reports, one can conclude that approximately 400 SS soldiers were to be accommodated in this shelter. At the same time, ammunition was to be stored in these gigantic halls for the defense of the so-called Alpine fortress.

The construction of the underground bomb shelter at Obersalzberg was led by Hitler's infamous secretary Martin Bormann. Bormann ordered the construction of such a bunker for his large family. Today you can enter here only with special permission.

77 steps connect Bormann's house to the underground shelter. A corridor almost 60 meters long led to his private quarters. Well-armed guards protected the passage from uninvited guests.

Florian Bayerl, Obersalzberg expert:“The entire complex of shelters in Obersalzberg was supplied autonomously. A separate water supply system, a ventilation system protected from the penetration of toxic substances, and a food supply were provided. You could stay here for quite some time. The only problem was that the passage could only be defended from the inside, there were no fortifications outside. This meant that during the siege, the enemy could easily pass to the posts of submachine gunners, and he would have to be knocked out of hiding. This is the Bormann compartment. Three ventilated rooms with beds, probably for children. Interestingly, warmer colors were deliberately used here to make the interior a little more cheerful. Light switches for children were located 50 cm lower than in other rooms. The floors were wooden, and one can easily imagine that there were beds here. As you can see, there were even paintings here - nails still stick out in the walls. The Bormanns lived here for weeks, of course, not only underground, but also in the house itself. Enemy bombers began to pose a serious threat from the end of 43, and the Bormanns, in fact, moved here.

Bormann's safe was removed by the Americans at the end of the war, its outlines are still guessed here. The headquarters room, equipped with the latest technology, received radiograms and reports from the fronts.

Bormann also prepared a small underground city for Hitler and Eva Braun. The entire entourage of the dictator could hide from the Allied bombing under Villa Berghoff.

At the beginning of April 1945, the necessary supplies were brought to the shelter. Even Allied intelligence assumed that Hitler had already moved to Obersalzberg.

News release, 1945:“The myth of the safety of Berchtesgaden, where more than one atrocity was planned, was dispelled in April by Allied heavy bombers. At dawn, they dropped 5-ton bombs on Hitler's infamous mountain hideout and the plain below, exploding deep underground. The nearby SS barracks were not left without attention either.

It is believed that here in a shelter occupying 1800 square meters. m, Hitler and his entourage could hold out for several weeks.

Florian Bayerl, Obersalzberg expert:“Until the last day in Obersalzberg they waited for the arrival of Hitler. Everything was ready, the rooms were furnished. Part of the guards of the Imperial Chancellery in Berlin had already been transferred here. Therefore, it can be assumed that if Hitler had transferred here, the war would have dragged on for some more time. From here, in theory, he could govern the remnants of his empire.”

When on May 1, 1945, Hitler's death was announced on the radio, the Obersalzberg guards rushed to dismantle the Fuhrer's property. The food stored in the warehouses of Berchtesgaden was distributed by the Americans to the locals. Hitler's personal archives were burned by one of his adjutants. The library, music collections and paintings that remained in the bunker were taken away by the Americans.

The premises intended for Eva Braun were completed and finished by April 1945. Her large wardrobe and china sets were already there. At the special request of Hitler's mistress, a bath was installed for her.

Today, almost nothing has been preserved here. The rooms are empty. And yet, treasure hunters continue to illegally enter here and search the mysterious hiding system.

The Fuhrer's room was next to Eva Braun's room. The setting was obviously spartan. The Americans took out furniture and lighting fixtures, and the rest went to tourists and souvenir hunters. Even the bathroom tiles were gone.

Hitler himself descended here only once. He decided to spend his last days in Berlin.

Russian scientists have discovered a previously unknown Nazi meteorological base in the Arctic.

The secret object is located on Alexandra Land, a thousand kilometers from the North Pole.

More than 500 World War II artifacts have been recovered from the ruins of the bunker, including gasoline cans and paper documents. Experts believe that the facility was built in 1942.
The Germans left the base in 1944.

About two years ago, with great skepticism (and even laughter), I looked through A. Rudakov's work "The Underground Reich Project and the Arctic Bastion".
Since it has appeared in the public domain, I will not deny myself the pleasure of giving readers the pleasure of reading separate excerpts from it:
“Once upon a time, within the framework of the intelligence department of the GDR Stasi (headed by Colonel General Markus Wolf), a special department AMT-X was created (headed by State Security General P. Kretz), which was entrusted with the development of the Underground Reich program.

In its operational search work, the Stasi relied on archival documents and testimonies of living witnesses of the RSHA AMT-VII "C" "Special scientific research and special scientific assignments.
The SS Sturmbannführer Rudolf Levin (born in Pirna in 1909) led the lecture.
Levin headed the "Sonderkommando X" (Hehen-Sonderkommando), which included researchers: Professor Obenaur (Bonn University), Ernst Merkel, Rudolf Richter, Wilhelm Spengler, Martin Biermann, Dr. Otto Eckstein, Bruno Brehm.

The employees of this secret unit actively studied the knight's castles of the first, second and third echelons. Only on the territory of Poland, about 500 castles were examined, where special underground SS facilities were subsequently placed.

The search for valuables within the framework of this post-war program at the Stasi was carried out by Department IX / II, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Encke (four sectors, 50 operational employees: Colonel of State Security Karl Drechsler, Lieutenant Colonel of State Security Otto Herz, State Security Captains Gerhard Kreipe, Helmut Klink).
This closed work, which began to bring good results, was put to an end by the "reformer" M. Gorbachev.
The two Germanys were united, a group of Soviet troops (GSVG) was hastily withdrawn from the territory of the GDR, Western special services began to pursue Stasi officers and hunt for their secret archives and developments.
This work was started by the American intelligence services much earlier, and in 1987 the German Stasi source Georg Stein, who was studying the Underground Reich and searching for valuables stolen by the Nazis, died.
The archive of Georg Stein fell into the hands of Baron Eduard Alexandrovich von Falz-Fein (place of residence Liechtenstein), who handed over the documents to the Soviet Union.

The writer Yulian Semenov was actively involved in the development of this topic, the latter fell ill and slowly died out in his prime.
As soon as the GRU General Staff, represented by Colonel-General Yuri Alexandrovich Gusev, deputy head of military intelligence, increased its attention to the Stasi archival documents and underground facilities of the Third Reich, Gusev died in December 1992 in a car accident.

According to the PGU of the KGB of the USSR (source - "Peter" Heinz Felfe - resident of the PGU of the KGB of the USSR Korotkov) in the 1960s. a secret investigation began in the mine of the town of Wansleben aan Zee.
Stasi operatives of Department X found SS documents, after which the mine was sealed.
It turned out that in 1943, from the most famous scientific institution in Germany, Leopoldina, a collection of rare books on medicine and botany of the 16th-17th centuries was sent for storage in Wansleben.
More than 7 thousand books and 13 paintings were hidden underground.
The Soviet units, which arrived 11 weeks after the Americans, took the entire assembly to Moscow.
According to Johan Tamm, director of Leopoldina, only 50 books from the missing collection have returned to the library so far.
Among the missing books are an early monograph by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, a text by Paracelsus from 1589, and a unique anatomical atlas by Andreas Vesalius from 1543.

Since April 1945, the US State Department has been conducting an all-out hunt for secret underground objects of the Reich.

On August 29, 1945, General McDonald sent a list of six underground aircraft factories to US Air Force Headquarters in Europe.

In October 1945, in a secret memorandum about underground factories and laboratories located in Germany and Austria, sent to the US Air Force headquarters, it was stated that the last check revealed a large number of German underground factories.

Underground structures have been discovered not only in Germany and Austria, but also in France, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Moravia.

The document stated: "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 built or laid down at the end of the war were discovered, to which we can add 600 caves and mines in Austria, Germany, East Prussia, the Czech Republic, Moravia, Montenegro, many of which were turned into underground workshops, institutes and laboratories for the production of weapons.
“One can only speculate what would have happened if the Germans had gone underground before the start of the war,” concludes the author of the memorandum, clearly struck by the scope of German underground construction.

For the purpose of deep sounding and covert use of underground facilities in Poland in the town of Morong (German: Morungen), 55 km from the border with Russia, in May 2010, the Pentagon deployed its next "Project Myth" - the Patriot medium-range missile defense system.

The territory of modern Poland is a strategic stronghold of the "Fourth Reich".

Object No. 1 "Wolfschanze" - "Wolf's Lair", East Prussia, located 7 km from the city of Rastenburg (German), today - the territory of Poland, the city of Kentszyn.
Hitler's main headquarters was located in a triangle between objects: Morong Castle - Barczewo Castle - Kętrzyn.

The complex included 200 structures for various purposes in the town of Görlitz (reconnaissance school SD "Zeppelin"), surrounded by Masurian lakes (east, north, south), the Boen fortress in the east.
The legend says that once there was a well with living water in this place, and the Teutonic Order built a castle here. All objects of the headquarters are placed on ley lines, taking into account sacred geometry, which are amplifiers of psychic and military energy. Fortification protective structures and technologies were borrowed from ancient Tibetan builders. An analogue of such a matrix is ​​the datsan “Keeped by Heaven”, the drawings of which were brought from an expedition to Tibet by Hauptmann Otto Renz.
Many of his bunkers and headquarters Hitler designed and drew sketches for projects and fortifications personally.

Headquarters "Wolfschanze" ("Wolf's Lair") in the area of ​​it. Rastenburg (East Prussia) is well known to the GRU General Staff; the construction of this headquarters was disguised under the guise of construction work by the Askania Nova company (owner Baron Eduard Alexandrovich von Falz-Fein, lives in Liechtenstein), for which a recruiting office was opened in Rastenburg and Polish workers were recruited, who then went to different places in Germany. The number of the rate was 2200 people. In 1944, to the north of this headquarters, due to Soviet air raids, a false headquarters was built. In addition, there were fears that, simultaneously with the attack on East Prussia, they would try to land troops in order to capture the headquarters. In this regard, the "Führer escort battalion" was enlarged and transformed into a mixed brigade under the command of Colonel Remer, who distinguished himself during the arrests of the conspirators on July 20, 1944.

Underground communications from Hitler's main headquarters "Wolfschanze", Rastenburg (Polish Kenshin), deployed in the direction of the Polish border hub town of Suwalki, then the territory of modern Russia begins - Krasnolesye - Gusev, the gateway system (German Gumbinnen) - Chernyakhovsk (German castle Insterburg ) - Znamensk - Gvardeysk - Kaliningrad (German: Koenigsberg) - base of the Russian Navy Baltiysk (German: Pillau, Baltic Sea). The secret underground tunnel was equipped with special sluice chambers, which were filled with water, as the communication constantly ran under the bed of a river or lake. Thus, small submarines were able to leave Hitler's headquarters at low speed in an unsubmerged position into the Baltic Sea. And if you move underground towards East Prussia (Kaliningrad region), then another underground passage is located in the area of ​​Morong Castle and Barchevo Castle (the place of imprisonment of Gauleiter Erich Koch) on Brunsberg (field Braniewo) (location of the SS Panzer Division) - Heiligenbal (Mamonovo) - Balga (Veseloe) castle - Koenigsberg (Kaliningrad) - Pillau (Baltiysk).

In the town of Brunsberg (Branevo), an SS Panzer Division was stationed (and after the war, a Soviet tank unit), so German tanks covered the strategic tunnel from above. One branch went to Heiligenbal (Mamonovo), where an aircraft factory was located deep underground, which is not mentioned in the above-mentioned document; not far away, under Lake Vitushka, there was a unique underwater secret airfield that covered the small stronghold of the Kriegsmarine of the first composition of the Fuhrer's Sonderconvoy. The sluice system could, in a matter of minutes, withdraw water from the river into underground reinforced concrete tanks, freeing the river bed for the runway. The main, main 70-kilometer tunnel originates in Morong, where today the US SEAL special forces (fur seals) are located under the cover of conventional army missile defense units, and goes into the dungeon of Balga Castle (Russia). From Balga Castle, an underwater passage leads to the Baltiysk (Pillau) base. During World War II, an SS division defending the Balga facility was evacuated along this underground highway in a few hours.

With the advent of A. Hitler to power in 1933, active underground construction began on the territory of the Third Reich and other strategic places of power.

Where was the rate movement vector directed? First of all, this is Berlin - Hitler's bunker (the main point of the geographical reference of the coordinate axis, the hidden underground direction of communications across Europe and the USSR; the author's version: perhaps to the poles).

This is the "line" Germany - France - Belgium - Switzerland - Austria - Montenegro - Albania - Hungary - Czech Republic - Moravia - Poland - East Prussia (Kaliningrad region) - Ukraine - Belarus - Russia. The “F. Todt Organization” has built a global underground network, which has not yet been systematically studied by military analysts of the GRU of the General Staff of Russia.

The principle of the ancient Tibetan magical Mandala was laid down in a special esoteric design of stakes. The unique network structure of 40 bunkers and rates of A. Hitler was a single plasma complex of generators "Thor", each rate was equipped with infrasonic and plasma weapons and had 13 degrees of protection.

All headquarters and strategic underground communications were quickly covered by intelligence schools, Sondergruppen, Sonderkommandos, Abwehr and SD.
Not far from Hitler's headquarters were the reconnaissance headquarters of Valli-1, Valli-2, Valli-3 and the 12th department of the Foreign Armies East service.

Smoothly flowing underground communications connected the Fuhrer's headquarters into a single system, one to one, 3 km from Berlin to Smolensk (Krasny Bor township), code name "Berenhalle" ("Bear's Lair"), territory Soviet Union. Interestingly, on the territory of the USSR, the Nazis are moving away from the wolf name, moving on to the totem of Russia - the big strong Bear. If you look at the reference point of the coordinate axis, Berlin is an ancient Slavic-Vandal city, on the coat of arms of which there is a bear.

Object No. 4 - “The Berenhalle” (“Bear's Lair”) headquarters, 3 km west of Smolensk, on the Smolensk-Minsk highway, was arranged in the same way as the Werwolf headquarters in Vinnitsa (Ukraine). Hitler stayed at this headquarters for no more than 2 hours, and spent the rest of the time at the headquarters of the army group.
The main headquarters complex went underground for seven floors, Hitler's armored train approached the third floor-tier. The vector of underground communications was connected to the Werewolf.

Today, the US military space group NASA constantly captures UFOs in the strategic locations of the Nazi submarine fleet and Hitler's headquarters, and NASA experts wonder if these are plasmoids, "flying discs" or UFOs?

At each Fuhrer's headquarters, a Lebensborn field office was organized.
Children born in this program from the SS officers who guarded the headquarters, and local beauties, were left by intelligence for deep settling. And today they are major functionaries in the places where mothballed headquarters and bunkers are located. Thus, today on the territory of Europe, Ukraine, Russia and the CIS countries, a hidden fifth block of agents of influence and management of the "New Reality" programs has been formed.

“The choice of the location of the headquarters was always made by the adjutant of the armed forces, General Schmundt, and the commandant of the headquarters, Colonel Thomas. Then the consent of the "imperial security service" headed by me was required.
The place was chosen taking into account sacred geometry and tied to the megalithic, castle, power, heraldic component.

The names "Wolfsschlucht", "Wolfschanze" and "Werwolf" were chosen because the name "Adolf" in Old German means "wolf".

Analysis of rates, bunkers, factories, institutions and other underground-underwater communications shows their movement to the Baltic Sea, to the territory of East Prussia, to the main bases of the Kriegsmarine.

The most closed and mysterious underground system is the medieval castle of the masters of the Teutonic Order of Malbork, which is connected by a tunnel to Morong Castle. It is possible that under the castle lake there is a mothballed Fau factory.
Malbork Castle connects an underground tunnel with the base - the Elblag shipyard.
Frombork Castle is located on the coast of the bay (German: Frisches-Haffen) of the Vistula-Kaliningrad and is connected by a tunnel to Morong Castle.
Morong-Malbork-Frombork castles form a small triangle where a factory was located underground, which today does not appear in any documents.

If you look closely at the geographical map, you can see that Darlowo - Tczew - Malbork - Morong - Barczewo are on the same ley line, that is, all these castles were originally planned to be connected into one underground highway.

The main benchmarks by which we can navigate underground facilities are intelligence schools, SS control centers and prisoner of war camps (labor force).

The reconnaissance and sabotage school in the town of Yablon was created on the territory of South-Eastern Poland to train Russian agents in March 1942 near Lublin (German: Leibus) and was located in the former castle of Count Zamoyski.

Officially, the organ was called "Yablon Hauptcamp" or "Special Part of the SS".
The school trained agents, saboteurs, radio operators and scouts. The personnel came from special preliminary camps for the Russians and the Zeppelin Sonderkommandos. There were up to 200 activists at the school at the same time.

From the testimony of SS Obergruppenführer Jakob Sporrenberg, Polish and Soviet intelligence became aware of the existence of the Kolokol project, which was born as a result of the merger of the top secret Lantern and Chronos projects.

Work within the framework of the Kolokol project began in mid-1944 at a closed SS facility located near Leibus (field of Lublin). After the entry of Soviet troops into Poland, the project was moved to a castle near the village of Fuerstenstein (Kschatz), not far from Waldenburg, and from there to a mine near Ludwigsdorf (Ludvikovichi), 20 km from another outskirts of Waldenburg, on the northern spurs of the Sudetes. I am faced with a difficult task: to link all the disparate historical, geographical, esoteric, technical, intelligence elements into one common picture of the world. Understanding this grandiose Nazi project, namely the future, and not the past, gives us today a unique opportunity to beat our opponents in all areas. Obama tried to impose on us the creation of a European missile defense system and almost persuaded the then President D.A. Medvedev. The purpose of this adventure was to draw us into a global military conflict in the Asia-Pacific region. Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and other subjects of the emerging global confrontation are only looking for an argument to attribute Russia to their enemies. Obama sought to create a kind of European shield out of Russia, using it as additional cover.

The reference points (places of power) on the territory of Poland were connected by underground communications with the Darlowo castle and other castles, bunkers and headquarters of the Fuhrer "Wolfschanze", the Barczewo castle, the Bialystok castle.

Object No. 5 Darłowo - A. Hitler's favorite castle and naval headquarters, a giant, has an advantageous strategic position, it is located on the Polish coast of the Baltic Sea. The Baltic outpost is a masterpiece of castle fortification architecture; Darłowo Castle was founded in 1352 by the Pomeranian prince Bohuslav V at the bend of two rivers flowing into the Baltic Sea. Before the war, German intelligence carried out repairs to the castle under the legend of creating a private museum in it - a common practice for encrypting secret objects. Since the capture of Poland in September 1939, the castle has become the secret residence of A. Hitler, and in this work, for the first time, he publicly appears in this role. Darłowo Castle is the key to unraveling the main secret of the Third Reich. Darlowo Castle is connected by a wormhole, which stretches from north to south, to Poznan, Mendzizhech to Lake Krzyva (Russian Kotel), where there is an airfield, a system of underground passages, special hydraulic structures located on the western side of the forest lake.

SS object No. 2 "Werwolf" ("Armed wolf") - the territory of the Soviet Union. Headquarters in Ukraine, 8 km north of the city of Vinnitsa; nearby were the villages of Kolo-Mikhailovka and Strizhavki. Initially, this headquarters was planned to be built in Lubny, Poltava region, but the activity of the partisans nullified this initiative. The construction of the headquarters began in the autumn of 1941, by April 1942 the main work on the above-ground part was completed. The protection was carried out by part of the SS division "Adolf Hitler". 20 km from the village. Strizhavki at the airfield Kalinovka based two regiments of fighter aircraft. According to documents, A. Hitler visited his headquarters three times, riding a boat along the Southern Bug. The headquarters was designed in such a way that, if necessary, Hitler could move along the river south to Nikolaev, and then to the Black Sea. On December 23, 1943, Hitler ordered the conservation of the headquarters.

"Adlerhorst" ("Eagle's Nest") - the old Ziegenberg castle, located high in the mountains near the city of Bad Nauheim at the foot of the Taunus ridge. In 1939, Hitler commissioned Albert Speer to build this headquarters in West Germany; 1 million marks were spent on the construction and modern communication lines.

“In 1945, during the Rundstedt offensive, Hitler temporarily moved to headquarters in the Nauheim area. This rate was called "Adlershorst". The headquarters was located in the castle, around which a group of bunkers was built, adapted to the surrounding mountainous and rocky terrain.

Due to the fact that the castle could be easily detected from the air, several wooden houses were built in the forest two kilometers from the castle, where Hitler was from December 22, 1944 to January 15, 1945. There was only one bunker for Hitler. All the buildings were well camouflaged with trees so that even up close it was difficult to detect anything.

Castle "Felzennest" ("Nest in the rock") was located high in the mountains on the right bank of the river. Rhine. The mountain on which the castle stood was in the immediate vicinity of the village of Rodert near the town of Bad Munstereifel. “The Felsennest headquarters, the Eiskirchen area, 35 km east of the Rhine, was a group of bunkers in the area of ​​​​the western rampart. It was called "The Nest in the Rock" because Hitler's bunker was built in natural rock."

"Tannenberg" ("Spruce Mountain"). “The Tannenberg headquarters was located in a wooded area of ​​the Black Forest. The nature of the surrounding area suggested this name.

"Wolfschlucht" ("Wolf Gorge"). “The headquarters in the Prue de Peche area on the Belgian-French border was called Wolfschlucht. The rate was located in the houses of a small town. The church that used to be there was demolished so that it would not serve as a guide from the air. In addition, there was a bunker for Hitler and one common bunker in case of an air attack.

“Rere” (“Tunnel”), “The headquarters in the Vesnev region (Galicia) was located in a specially built tunnel with reinforced concrete walls and ceilings 1.5-2 m thick. A railway line was connected to the tunnel so that, if necessary, it could drive up Hitler's special train. The tunnel was built at the foot of a wooded hill and well camouflaged from above so that it could not be detected by air reconnaissance.

In this rate, Hitler stayed only for one night in 1941 during Mussolini's arrival at the front.
From here they then flew together to Uman.

In addition, under the camouflage name "Silesian Construction Joint-Stock Company", in the fall of 1943, construction began on a new Hitler's headquarters in the area of ​​Schweidnitz (Silesia). However, only earthworks were carried out, since the final construction of this rate required at least one more year. The construction of the Frankenstein castle was almost completed, where Ribbentrop and foreign guests coming to Hitler's headquarters were to be accommodated.

In 1941, between the cities of Soissons and Laon (France), there was also Hitler's headquarters, reminiscent of the nature of the buildings (bunkers) there in the region of Rastenburg. This rate was called "West-2".

Construction work was also started on the construction of rates "West-1" and "West-3" in the area of ​​the city of Vandom. In 1943, they fell into the hands of the allied forces in an unfinished state.

"Underground Reich". All three programs under the auspices of the SS were rooted in depth, where underground facilities were integrated into a single complex of factories, institutes, and laboratories. The leadership of the Third Reich was faced with the task of connecting all the sea castles of the "Baltic Bastion" into a single underground-underwater complex, where "flying discs" and the main component of their protection, the Kriegsmarine submarine fleet, could take a key place.

This version makes one think that aircraft factories could produce not only aircraft, but also something else, since the loading of finished products took place on submarines directly in the underground bunker part of the factories.

On the territory of Eastern Poland there was a Heidelager training missile range, the town of Blizna, 150 km northeast of Krakow. From Krakow, the tunnel goes in the direction of Ukraine: Lviv - Vinnitsa (Hitler's headquarters "Werwolf") - Nikolaev - Sudak (Black Sea).

Another secret underground route ran through Bialystok (Poland), Erich Koch's castle, then the territory of Belarus, Grodno - Minsk, Hitler's headquarters "Krasny Bor" ("Bear's Lair"), Smolensk.

The strategic tunnel went in the direction of Berlin along the line Blizna - Krakow - Wroclaw - Legnica - Cottbus - Berlin. In the town of Legnica, the SS Panzer Division "Dead Head" (division commander Theodor Eicke) was based. The entrance to the dungeon starts in one of the division's barracks under the stairs. Not far from the town of Legnica is the town of Tscheben, where the test site for "flying discs" was located, which were manufactured at the underground factory in Wroclaw (Breslau). A very interesting coat of arms near the city of Legnica: two keys that denote two sources - living and dead water.

In August 1942, the German command of the NORD naval group decided to conduct Operation Magic Country and sent the cruiser Admiral Speer (commander - Captain 1st Rank Theodor Kranke) to the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya and further, to the Vilkitsky Strait (Northern Earth). The main objective of this raid was the covert provision of building materials, food, fuel and torpedoes to the secret Arctic bases of the Kriegsmarine submarine fleet. The heavy cruiser was accompanied by a "wolf pack" - a group of five submarines U-209, U-601, U-251 (reconnaissance submarine; commander Peter Hansen was an employee of the Abwehr), U-255, U-456. Groups of submarines were on a permanent basis in the ice of the Soviet Arctic: the group (Eisteufel) "Angelfish": U-251, 376, 408, 334, 335, 657, 88, 456, 703, 457, 255; group (Tragertod) "Bringing death": U-377 commander Otto Köhler, U-408 commander Reinhard von Chiemann, U-405 commander Rolf Henrich Hopmann, U-88 commander Heino Bomann, U-403 commander Heinz-Ehlert Clausenn, U- 457 commander Karl Brandenburg. "Wolf packs" also worked in the Arctic - groups of submarines: (Umbau) "Perestroika", (Umhang) "Cape", (Donner) "Thunder", (Strauchritter), (Ulan) "Ulan", (Greif), ( Kail) "Wedge", (Viking).

August 14, 1942 Submarine U-255, project VII "C", commander Reinhard Rehe, from the 13th Kriegsmarine flotilla takes part in the implementation of the operation "Fairyland", supplying fuel to the hydroplane BV-138 ("flugboat") 130- 1st Marine Reconnaissance Aviation Group. On August 25, 1942, the "polar fox" U-255 fired artillery at the Soviet radio and meteorological reconnaissance post in the area of ​​​​Cape Zhelaniya. Since 1943, naval reconnaissance seaplanes BV-138 (“flugboat”) were based at a secret airfield on the northern island of Novaya Zemlya, aircraft carried out aerial reconnaissance in the Kara Sea, delivered urgent small cargoes to the Kriegsmarine bases to the Nordensheld archipelago.

By the end of 1943, it became clear that Germany had lost the Second World War. 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 bombardment of German cities by US and British aircraft, the Fuehrer, as usual, impulsively ordered that the country's military industry be transferred to colossal mountain bunkers. Onliner.by tells how, in just a few months, dozens of plants vital for the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe disappeared underground, including the production of top-secret "retribution weapons", Hitler's last hope, and what price the world paid for this.

Already in 1943, World War II came to Germany in earnest. Before the direct entry of the Allied troops into the Third Reich, there was still a lot of time, but the inhabitants of the country could no longer sleep peacefully in their beds. Since the summer of 1942, the aviation of Great Britain and the United States began to gradually move from the practice of pinpoint raids on the strategic objects of the Nazi military infrastructure to the so-called carpet bombing. In 1943, their intensity increased significantly, reaching in next year peak (900 thousand tons of bombs dropped in total).

The Germans needed to save their military industry first of all. In 1943, at the suggestion of Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, a program was developed to decentralize German industry, which involved the redeployment of the most important industries for the army from large cities to small towns, mainly in the east of the country. Hitler, however, had a different opinion. He demanded, in his usual categorical manner, to hide military plants and factories 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 "Wolf's Lair" in Rastenburg, his Alpine summer 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 (on the territory of modern southwestern Poland), the so-called Project Giant (Projekt Riese), the new main headquarters of the Fuhrer, which would have replaced the already doomed Wolf's Lair, was actively implemented.

It was assumed that a grandiose system of seven objects would be built here at once, which could accommodate both the top leadership of the Reich, and the command of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. The center of the "Giant", apparently, was to be a complex under the mountain Wolfsberg ("Wolf Mountain"), whose name successfully reflected the Fuhrer's passion for everything connected with wolves. During the year, they managed to build a network of tunnels with a total length of more than 3 kilometers and large piedmont halls up to 12 meters high and with 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 the most complete form (about 85% complete), there was a bunker under the largest Fürstenstein castle in Silesia (modern Ksenzh), where, again, according to indirect data, Hitler's main 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.

It is difficult to determine the specific purpose of other objects; 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 on the transfer of the most important industrial enterprises for the military economy under the ground unfolded 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 completed within a few years, the project received Hitler's personal approval. Franz Xaver Dorsch, the new head of the Organization Todt, the largest military construction conglomerate in 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.

First of all, aircraft manufacturing enterprises were to be covered. For example, in May 1944, under the Houbirg mountain near Nuremberg in Franconia, construction began on an underground factory where it was planned to produce BMW aircraft engines. Speer after the end of the war wrote in his memoirs: “In February 1944, raids were made on huge factories that produced aircraft bodies, and not on enterprises that produced aircraft engines, although it is the number of engines that is decisive for the aircraft industry. If the number of produced aircraft engines were reduced, we could not increase the production of aircraft.

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

The construction of the Dogger facility was also carried out in the traditional way. There was an acute shortage of labor 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 the construction - at an unimaginable pace, around the clock, in the most difficult mountainous 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 had 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 foothills were sealed, most likely forever. Of the 9.5 thousand forced laborers of the complex, half died.

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

The enterprise was intended for the production of ultra-modern Messerschmitt Me.262 fighter-bombers, the world's first mass-produced jet aircraft. By April 1945, when Bergkristall was captured by American troops, almost a thousand Me.262s had been produced here. But this object will go down in history with the monstrous living and working conditions created on it for prison builders. Their average life expectancy 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 Seegrotte (“Lake Grotto”) gypsum mine near Vienna, the production of He.162 jet fighters was organized, and spare parts for aircraft were produced in the Engelberg tunnel of the A81 autobahn near Stuttgart.

In 1944, dozens and dozens of similar enterprises were created. For the construction of some of them, even a mountain was not needed. For example, the mass production of all the same Me.262 (up to 1200 units per month) was planned to be organized at 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 conceived plants of this type, they managed to start building one, in Upper Bavaria, which received the code name Weingut I (“Vineyard-1”). Work began in an underground tunnel specially laid on the site, located at a depth of 18 meters. Soil was removed from there and the foundations of 12 huge concrete arches up to 5 meters thick were laid, which served as the ceilings 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 used 125 tons of dynamite could not cope with one of the arches.

However, the Nazis managed to complete their largest underground plant. In August 1943, under the Konstein mountain near the city of Nordhausen, construction began on an object officially called the Mittelwerke (“Middle Plant”). It was here, in the Harz mountain range in the center of Germany, that the release of the “weapon of retaliation” (Vergeltungswaffe), the same “wunderwaffe”, “wonder weapon”, with 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, industrial gypsum mining began in Mount Konstein. In the 1930s, the mines, no longer used, were turned into a strategic arsenal of fuels and lubricants for the Wehrmacht. It was these tunnels, primarily due to the relative ease of developing soft gypsum rock, that it was decided to expand in a colossal way, 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 weapons - 2", which went down in history under the symbol V-2 ("V-2").

On August 17-18, 1943, RAF bombers carried out Operation Hydra, the target of which was the German Peenemünde missile center in the north-east of the country. A massive raid on the test site showed its vulnerability, after which it was decided to transfer the production of the latest weapons to the center of Germany, to an underground factory. Just 10 days after the Hydra and the launch of the Mittelwerke project, on August 28, a concentration camp was formed near Nordhausen, called "Dora-Mittelbau". 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, did not wait for release, perishing in the tunnels under Konstein.

The most difficult months were October, November and December 1943, when the main work was carried out to expand the Mittelwerke mine system. Thousands of unfortunate prisoners, malnourished, sleep deprived, subjected to physical punishment for the slightest reason, blew up the rock around the clock, took it to the surface, equipped a secret factory where the planet's most modern weapons were to be born.

In December 1943, Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer visited Mittelwerke: “In the spacious long adits, the prisoners installed equipment and laid pipes. When our group passed by, they tore off their blue twill berets and looked blankly 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 inhuman exploitation of concentration camp prisoners, Speer wrote "Memoirs", in which, in particular, he confessed: “I am still tormented by a deep sense of personal guilt. Even then, after inspecting the plant, the overseers told me about unsanitary conditions, about damp caves in which prisoners live, about rampant diseases, about extremely high mortality. 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 order.

Built in the shortest possible time, 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 an enterprise code-named Nordwerke ("Northern Plant"), where engines for Junkers aircraft were produced. The Mittelwerke ("Middle Works") proper occupied the southern half of the system. In addition, the plans of the Nazis, which were never realized, included the creation of the “Southern Plant” near Friedrichshafen and the “Eastern Plant” in the vicinity of Riga.

The width of the tunnels was sufficient for a device inside a full-fledged railway. Trains with spare parts and raw materials entered the complex through the northern entrances and left it with finished products from 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 made a special report for the Fuhrer from the depths of Mittelwerke, which was supposed to demonstrate the full-fledged assembly production of the "weapon of retaliation" created in the shortest possible time. Unique photographs have only recently been discovered, which allowed us not only to see the largest underground plant in the Reich in operation, but also in color.

Nordhausen and Mittelwerke were occupied by 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 enterprise to study the Nazi missile experience, Boris Chertok, later an academician and one of the closest associates of Sergei Korolev, left curious memories of his visit to the plant.

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

The German, who was introduced as an assembly test engineer, said the plant was running at full capacity almost until May. In the "best" months, its productivity reached 35 rockets per day! The Americans selected only fully assembled missiles from the factory. There are over a hundred of them here. They even organized electrical horizontal tests, and before the arrival of the Russians, they loaded all the assembled missiles into special wagons and took 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, stopped only a day before their invasion. Everything amazed them. There were hundreds of rockets 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 120,000 prisoners passed through the camp. At first they built - they gnawed at this mountain, then the survivors and still new ones worked already at the factory underground. We found the survivors in the camp by accident. There were many corpses in the tunnels underground.

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

With all this, the prisoners still, to the extent possible, sabotaged the production of the V-2, even despite all 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 already after the rocket was sent during its tests before launch or in flight. Someone taught them how to make unreliable soldering electrical connections. This is very difficult to verify. German control personnel were not able to keep track of tens of thousands of rations a day.

The V-2 rockets discovered by US and Soviet troops at Mittelwerke subsequently formed the basis of both countries' space programs. Soviet experts noted: “While militarily, the A-4 rocket (aka V-2) had practically no serious impact on the course of the war, in scientific and technical terms, its creation was an outstanding achievement of German specialists, which was recognized by specialists from all countries that 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 were working on the project of the A-9 / A-10 rocket, which, in fact, was a full-fledged ballistic intercontinental carrier, the purpose of which was already retribution not only from Great Britain but also the USA. This was reflected even in its unofficial name Amerika-Rakete. It was planned that the "rocket for America" ​​would be able to overcome up to 5.5 thousand kilometers, bearing 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, code-named Zement (“Cement”). Initially conceived as a reserve command center of the Luftwaffe, then it was reformatted for the production of V-2 missiles and Wasserfall (“Waterfall”) anti-aircraft missiles. The next step was to be the release of the intercontinental Amerika-Rakete.

The project was not completed, but the tunnels and halls that have been built give an idea of ​​the scale of the products planned for release here. By the end of 1944, in the workings, reaching a height of 30 meters, they launched the production of spare parts for tanks.

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

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

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

Americans after the occupation of their part of Germany were shocked by the scale of underground construction in the country. In a special report sent to the main headquarters of the Air Force, it was 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 built or laid down at the end of the war were discovered, plus another 600 caves and shafts, many of which were turned into assembly lines and laboratories for the production of weapons.

So it remains only to speculate what would have happened if the Germans had gone underground before the start of the war.

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. It is believed that here are the keys to many secrets of the Third Reich, 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 is 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 down to a depth of 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 bunker, 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 ...

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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.

“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.

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 blinds. 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 a burst of machine guns,” says her blank, unblinking gaze. 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 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: wide - four meters in diameter - a concrete well goes vertically down to the depth of a ten-story at home. 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 ...

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 Henrik Station - abandoned, dusty, dark ...

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 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 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 the 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.

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 Eastern Wall - Ostwall, with the only difference being 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 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.