“In the Polish city of Gorzow Wielkopolski, police detained a Chechen suspected of participating in a terrorist attack committed a few months ago in an underground passage on Pushkinskaya Square in Moscow. The development of this case began back in August, when, during the arrest of several criminals, one of them, also a Chechen, was found to have up to 5 kilograms of TNT ... "

I would not have paid special attention to this newspaper note if it were not for the name of the city I recently visited - Gorzow Wielkopolski. What made the terrorist seek refuge there, not in the most crowded Polish city? It would be much easier to “dissolve” in Krakow, Poznan, Wroclaw, to get lost in the diverse crowd, where Chechen communities live and operate, where there is even a Chechen broadcasting radio station ...

So, if I were a militant, no matter what - Chechen, neo-fascist, etc. - I would also come first to Gorzow Wielkopolski - before 1945, the East Prussian city of Landsberg. I would drive to the vicinity of this wonderful town, drive my car along one of the country roads that go into the hills overgrown with pine trees, then I would drive under the arches of the concrete portal framing the entrance to the underground highway, and park the car at the platform of one of the abandoned since the war stations, located at a depth of forty meters ...

Here, in the bowels of the Wielkopolska region, there is the most extensive fortification in the world - the "Earthworm Camp". It was built for more than ten years, first by Reichswehr engineers, and then by Wehrmacht specialists ...

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 bat-winged creatures decided that people had built these multi-storey dungeons for them, and settled there for a long time 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 chose the silhouette of a bat as its emblem ...

There were, go and legends about this area for a long time to come - one darker than the other.

One of the pioneers of the local catacombs, Colonel Alexander Liskin, says: “Near Lesnoye 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, it could also be that the current was provided by an autonomous power plant hidden underground, perhaps its turbines were rotated by water falling into the well ... They said that the lake was somehow connected to the surrounding reservoirs, 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 a mysterious tunnel on a dare. More scorcher was not seen ... "

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

Fortified area map

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 possible "why?" and why?".

Only in the eighties was an in-depth engineering and sapper reconnaissance of the camp carried out by the forces of the Soviet troops, which were located in this region of Poland.

Here is what one of the participants in the underground expedition, technician-captain Cherepanov, later said: “In one of the pillboxes, we went down the steel spiral staircases deep underground. By the light of acid lamps we entered the underground metro. It was precisely the subway, as the railway track ran along the bottom of the tunnel. The ceiling was without signs of soot. The walls are neatly lined with cables. Probably, the locomotive here was driven by electricity.

The group entered the tunnel not at the beginning. The entrance to it was somewhere under the Forest Lake. The entire route rushed to the west - to the Oder River. Almost immediately discovered an underground crematorium. Perhaps it was in his ovens that the remains of the dungeon builders were burned.

Slowly, with precautionary measures, the search party moved through the tunnel in the direction of modern Germany. Soon they stopped counting the tunnel branches - dozens of them were discovered. Both right and left. But most of the branches were neatly walled up. Perhaps these were approaches to unknown objects, including parts of the underground city ...

It was dry in the tunnel - a sign of good waterproofing. It seemed that from the other, unknown side, the lights of a train or a large truck were about to appear.

The group moved slowly and after a few hours of being underground, they began to lose the feeling of having really gone through ...

The study of a mothballed underground city, laid under forests, fields and rivers, is a task for specialists of a different level. This different level required a lot of effort, money and time. According to our estimates, the subway could stretch for tens of kilometers and "dive" under the Oder. Where further and where its final station - it was difficult even to guess. Soon the leader of the group decided to return ... "

Of course, without a plan-scheme, it is impossible to reveal the secrets of the "Earthworm Camp". As for walled up dead ends, experts believe that there, under the protection of mine traps, both samples of secret military equipment for that time and valuables taken from the museums of the occupied countries can be stored.

In the story of the technician-captain Cherepanov, only one thing is doubtful - an underground crematorium, in which, perhaps, the bodies of the builders were burned. The fact is that this fortification miracle was built not by captive slaves, but by high-class professionals from the construction army of Todt: mine surveyors, hydraulic engineers, railway workers, concrete workers, electricians ... Each was responsible for his own object or a small area of ​​​​work, and none of them could even imagine the general scale of the fortified area. Todt's people applied all the technical innovations of the 20th century, supplementing them with the experience of the builders of medieval castles in terms of all kinds of traps and deadly surprises for uninvited visitors. No wonder the name of their boss was consonant with the word "death." In addition to the floor-shifters, the scouts were also waiting for cord charges, the explosions of which filled up the tunnels, burying enemy saboteurs alive under tons of sand.

Probably, even the SS division that occupied this area was chosen by the awesome name - “Toden Kopf” - “Dead Head”.

Nevertheless, nothing can frighten amateur researchers of "earthworm holes". At their own peril and risk, they go to the Todt labyrinth, hoping for stunning discoveries and a happy return.

The Polish journalist Krzysztof Pilyavsky and I were no exception either. And a local old-timer - a former tanker, and now a taxi driver - named Jozef, taking with him a fluorescent lamp, undertook to take us to one of the twenty-two underground stations. All of them were once designated by male and female names: “Dora”, “Marta”, “Emma”, “Berta” ... The closest to Miedzyrzech is “Henrik”. Our guide claimed that it was to his platform that Hitler arrived from Berlin in order to go from here - already by land - to the field headquarters near Rastenburg - 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" along a narrow highway to the south-west of the city. In the village of Kalava, we turn towards the Scharnhorst bunker. This is one of the strongholds of the defensive system of the Pomor Wall. And the places in the area are idyllic and do not fit in with military terms: 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 ... The Lord created this land with tenderness. The Antichrist, with no less zeal, laid his concrete paths in its bowels ...

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 intakes, again closed by armored shutters. The gills of an underground monster ... Above the entrance, there is an inscription spattered 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 the chest - a frontal battle. “Entered without a pass - get a burst of machine guns,” her empty, unblinking gaze says. This is the chamber of the entrance vestibule. Once upon a time, its floor treacherously failed, and an intruder flew into the well, as was practiced in medieval castles. Now it is securely fixed.

We turn into a narrow side corridor that leads into the bunker, but after a few steps it 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, the other housed a flamethrower, the third housed heavy machine guns ... Here is the commander's "cabin" - "Fuhrer-raum", periscope enclosures, radio room, map storage, toilets and a washbasin, and also a camouflaged emergency exit.

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

There are one hundred and fifty steps here,” Jozef reports.

We follow him with bated breath: what is below? And below, at a depth of 45 meters, 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 cold it is in this cold dungeon: the temperature here is constant both in summer and in winter - 10 degrees. 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, and yet they hold back both the pressure of the bowels and the pressure of water ...

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

Your foreman went there on a motorcycle, - Jozef waved his hand into the dark mouth of the main tunnel.

How did he get the bike in here?

And here, one and a half kilometers away, there is the village of Vysokoye. There is an underground entrance. And now let's look at the bats ...

We turn to the side.

Soon, puddles sloshed underfoot - drainage grooves stretched along the edges of the footpath, ideal drinkers for bats. The beam of the lantern jumped upward, and a large living bunch of bony-winged half-birds-half-animals stirred above our heads. Cold goosebumps ran down the back - what a dirty trick, however! For nothing that is useful - it eats mosquitoes.

They say that the souls of dead sailors inhabit seagulls. Then the souls of the SS must move into bats. And judging by the number of bats nesting under concrete vaults, the entire “Dead Head” division is here, which disappeared without a trace in 1945 in the Mezeritsky dungeon.

Mezeritsky fortified area. Todt's construction army engineers turned both rivers and lakes into military installations. Until now, in the local forests, one can stumble upon sluices, hydraulic locks, canals, and spillways of incomprehensible purpose.

About ten years ago, Colonel Liskin, together with the commander of one of the companies of the Miedzyrzecz garrison, Captain Gamow, examined the largest local lake.

“We got into a boat,” Alexander Liskin shares his impressions, “and, changing in turn at the oars, circled the lake in a few hours. We walked in close proximity to the shore. From the eastern side of the lake rose several powerful, already overgrown with undergrowth hills-heaps. In some places, artillery caponiers were guessed in them, facing the front to the east and south. I also managed to notice two small lakes similar to puddles. Shields with inscriptions in two languages ​​towered nearby: “Danger! Mines!

Do you see the heaps? - asked Gamow. - Like the Egyptian pyramids. Inside are various secret passages, manholes. Through them, from under the ground, our radio relayers, when arranging the garrison, got facing slabs. They said that there are real galleries. As for these puddles, then, according to the sappers, these are the flooded entrances to the underground city. I recommend looking at another mystery - an island in the middle of a lake ... A few years ago, sentries of a low-altitude post noticed that this island was not really an island in the usual sense. He swims, or rather, drifts slowly, standing as if at anchor.

I looked around. The floating island is overgrown with firs and willows. Its area did not exceed fifty square meters, and it seemed that it really slowly and heavily swayed on the black water of a still reservoir.

Forest Lake also had a clearly artificial southwestern and southern extension, reminiscent of an appendix. Here the pole went two or three meters deep, the water was relatively clear, but lush, fern-like algae completely covered the bottom. In the middle of this bay, a gray reinforced concrete tower rose gloomily, clearly once having a special purpose. Looking at her, I remembered the air intakes of the Moscow metro, accompanying its deep tunnels. Through the narrow window it was clear that there was water inside the concrete tower.

There was no doubt: somewhere below me there was an underground structure, which for some reason had to be erected right here, in remote places near Miedzyrzecz.”

And it was necessary to build it exactly why the entire fortified area was created: to hang a powerful castle on the main strategic axis of Europe - Moscow - Warsaw - Berlin - Paris. A hundred kilometers from the heart of Germany, this armored concrete shield was created.

The Chinese built their Great Wall in order to cover the borders of the Celestial Empire from the invasion of nomads. The Germans did almost the same, erecting the East Wall - Ostwall, with the only difference that they laid their "wall" underground. They began to build it back in 1927, and only ten years later they completed the first stage. Believing to sit behind this "impregnable" shaft, the Nazi strategists moved from here, first to Warsaw, and then to Moscow, leaving captured Paris in the rear. The outcome of the great campaign to the East is known.

In the winter of the forty-fifth, the fighters of General Gusakovsky broke through this "impassable" line and moved directly to the Oder.

According to the game of historical chance, it was on the very line along which the underground corridors pass that the hordes of Genghis Khan stopped and turned back.

In post-war times, the Soviet brigade of government communications and other units of the Northern Group of Forces were stationed in the area of ​​the "Earthworm Camp". For all these years, only partial engineering reconnaissance of the underground "metro" was carried out. There weren’t enough funds for more, and they didn’t want to risk people: who could guarantee that there were no mines on the underground routes? Therefore, without any doubt, the armored doors leading into the depths of the mysterious structure were welded with autogenous.

Now everything is wide open. Now "Earthworm Camp" is available not only to bats.

And who knows what stocks of explosives and military equipment lurk in the bricked-up dead ends of the underground labyrinth? And what has been stored there since the time of the SS "Dead Head"? And why are Chechen fighters arrested not far from the entrances to this mysterious and gloomy dungeon?

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During the Second World War and after it, according to the degree of advancement of Soviet troops in the territory occupied by the Nazis, stories began to appear, testimonies of those who encountered and saw with their own eyes the underground structures created by the Nazis. To this day, the purpose of some of them remains unknown and excites historians with its mysteries.

In Poland and Germany, there are still legends about mysterious underground fortifications lost in the forests of northwestern Poland and designated on Wehrmacht maps as the "Earthworm Camp". This concrete and reinforced underground city remains to this day one of the terra incognita. According to those who visited there in the 60s of the last century, this area appeared as a small settlement lost in the folds of the relief of northwestern Poland, which, as it seemed, had been forgotten by everyone.

Around are gloomy, impenetrable forests, small rivers and lakes, old minefields, gouges, nicknamed "dragon's teeth", and ditches of Wehrmacht fortified areas broken by Soviet troops overgrown with thistles. Concrete, barbed wire, mossy ruins - all these are the remains of a powerful defensive rampart, which once had the goal of "covering" the fatherland in case the war rolls back. The Germans called Mendzizhech Mezeritz. The fortified area, which also absorbed Kenshitsa, is Mezeritsky. Here, on a patch of Europe little known to the world, the military talked about the secret of the forest lake Kshiva, located somewhere nearby, in the salary of a deaf coniferous forest. But no details. More like rumors, speculation...

At that time, a five-battalion brigade was stationed there, stationed in a former German military town, hidden from prying eyes in a green forest. Once it was this place that was marked on the Wehrmacht maps with the toponym "Regenwurmlager" - "Earthworm Camp".

According to the stories of local residents, there were no protracted battles here, the Germans could not withstand the onslaught. When it became clear to them that the garrison (two regiments, the school of the SS division "Dead Head" and support units) could be surrounded, he urgently evacuated. It is hard to imagine how it was possible for almost a whole division to escape from this natural trap in a few hours. And where? If the only road was already intercepted by the tanks of the 44th Guards Tank Brigade of the First Guards Tank Army of General M. E. Katukov of the Soviet troops.

The amazing beauty of the Kenshitsa forest lake is everywhere surrounded by signs of mystery, which, it seems, even the air is saturated here. From 1945 until almost the end of the 1950s, this place was, in fact, only under the supervision of the security department of the city of Mendzizhech - where, as they say, a Polish officer named Telyutko supervised him in his service - and the commander stationed somewhere near the Polish artillery regiment. With their direct participation, the temporary transfer of the territory of the former German military camp to the Soviet communications brigade was carried out. A convenient town fully met the requirements and seemed to be all at a glance. At the same time, the prudent command of the brigade decided at the same time not to violate the rules for quartering troops and ordered a thorough engineering and sapper reconnaissance in the garrison and the surrounding area.

It was then that the discoveries began that struck the imagination of even experienced front-line soldiers who were still serving at that time. Let's start with the fact that near the lake, in a reinforced concrete box, an insulated 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 Mendzizhech.

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 of the brigade were unable to verify these assumptions. Parts of the SS that were in the camp on the fateful days of the 45th, as if sunk into the water. Since it was impossible to bypass the lake around the perimeter due to the impassability of the forest, the military decided to do it by water. In a few hours they rounded the lake and walked in close proximity to the shore. From the eastern side of the lake rose several powerful, already overgrown with undergrowth hills-heaps. In some places, artillery caponiers were guessed in them, facing the front to the east and south. I also managed to notice two small lakes similar to puddles. Shields with inscriptions in two languages ​​towered nearby: “Danger! Mines!

The military then said that the heaps were Egyptian pyramids. Inside them, it seemed, there were various secret passages, manholes. Through them, from under the ground, Soviet radio relayers, when arranging the garrison, got facing slabs. They said that "there" are real galleries. As for these puddles, then, according to the sappers, these are the flooded entrances to the underground city. There was another mystery there - an island in the middle of the lake. The military noticed that this island is not really an island in the usual sense. He swims, or rather, slowly drifts, standing as if at anchor.

This is how one of the witnesses described this island: “The floating island is overgrown with spruces and willows. Its area did not exceed fifty square meters, and it seemed that it really slowly and heavily swayed on the black water of a still reservoir. The forest lake also had a clearly artificial southwestern and southern extension, reminiscent of an appendix. Here the pole went two or three meters deep, the water was relatively clear, but the lush and fern-like algae completely covered the bottom. In the middle of this bay, a gray reinforced concrete tower rose gloomily, clearly once having a special purpose. Looking at it, I remembered the air intakes of the Moscow metro, accompanying its deep tunnels. Through the narrow window it was clear that there was water inside the concrete tower. There was no doubt: somewhere below me there was an underground structure, which for some reason had to be erected right here, in remote places near Miedzizhech.

During one of the numerous engineering reconnaissance, sappers revealed the entrance to the tunnel disguised as a hill. Already at the first approximation, it became clear that this was a serious structure, moreover, probably with various kinds of traps, including mines. For obvious reasons, information about this unusual expedition remained confidential at the time.

One of the members of one of the search groups, technician-captain Cherepanov later said that after one pillbox, they descended deep into the ground along steel spiral staircases. By the light of acid lamps we entered the underground metro. It was precisely 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. Probably, the locomotive here was driven by electricity.

The group entered the tunnel not at the beginning. The beginning of the tunnel was somewhere under the forest lake. The other part was directed to the west - to the Oder River. Almost immediately discovered an underground crematorium. Slowly, with precautionary measures, the search party moved through the tunnel in the direction of modern Germany. Soon they stopped counting the tunnel branches - dozens of them were discovered. Both right and left. But most of the branches were neatly walled up. Perhaps these were approaches to unknown objects, including parts of the underground city.

The grandiose underground network remained for the uninitiated a labyrinth threatening many dangers. It was not possible to test it thoroughly. It was dry in the tunnel - a sign of good waterproofing. It seemed that from the other, unknown, side, the lights of a train or a large truck were about to appear (vehicles could also move there). According to Cherepanov, it was a man-made underground world, which is an excellent implementation of engineering. The captain said that the group moved slowly and after a few hours of being underground began to lose the feeling of really passed.

Some of its participants came up with the idea that the study of a mothballed underground city, laid under forests, fields and rivers, is a task for specialists of a different level. This different level required a lot of effort, money and time. According to military estimates, the subway could stretch for tens of kilometers and "dive" under the Oder. Where further and where its final station - it was difficult even to guess.

Gradually, a new vision of this unusual military riddle took shape. It turned out that in the period from 1958 to 1992, the five-battalion brigade changed nine commanders in turn, and each of them - like it or not - had to adapt to the neighborhood with this unsolved underground territory. According to the engineering and sapper conclusion, 44 kilometers of underground communications were discovered and examined under the garrison alone. According to one of the officers who served in the Soviet garrison, the height and width of the underground metro shaft are approximately three meters. The neck smoothly lowers and dives underground to a depth of fifty meters. There, the tunnels branch and intersect, there are transport interchanges. The walls and ceiling of the subway are made of reinforced concrete slabs, the floor is lined with rectangular stone slabs.

According to a Polish local historian, Dr. Podbelsky, who has been studying this city for many years, the Germans began building this strategic object as early as 1927, but most actively since 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany. In 1937, the latter personally arrived at the camp from Berlin and, as they claimed, along the rails of a secret subway. In fact, from that moment on, the hidden city was considered handed over to the use of the Wehrmacht and the SS. Through some hidden communications, the giant facility was connected to the plant and strategic storage facilities, also underground, located in the area of ​​the villages of Vysoka and Peski, which is two to five kilometers west and north of the lake.

Lake Kshiva itself is an integral part of the mystery. The area of ​​its mirror is at least 200 thousand square meters, and the depth scale is from 3 (in the south and west) to 20 meters (in the east). It was in its eastern part that some Soviet servicemen managed in the summer, under favorable lighting, to see something on the silty bottom, in its outlines and other features resembling a very large hatch, which received the nickname “the eye of the underworld” from the servicemen.

The so-called "eye" was tightly closed. Was it not at one time that the floating island already mentioned above should have covered him from the gaze of a pilot and a heavy bomb? What could such a hatch be used for? Most likely, he served as a kingston for emergency flooding of part or all of the underground structures. But if the hatch is closed to this day, it means that it was not used in January 1945. Thus, it cannot be ruled out that the underground city is not flooded, but mothballed "until a special occasion." Does its underground horizons store something? Who are they waiting for? Around the lake, in the forest, there are many preserved and destroyed wartime objects. Among them are the ruins of a rifle complex and a hospital for the elite of the SS troops. Everything was made of reinforced concrete and refractory bricks. And most importantly - powerful pillboxes. Their reinforced concrete and steel domes were once armed with heavy machine guns and cannons, equipped with semi-automatic ammunition feed mechanisms. Under the meter-long armor of these caps, underground floors went to a depth of up to 30-50 meters, where sleeping and amenity premises, ammunition and food depots, as well as communication centers were located.

The approaches to these deadly firing points were securely covered by minefields, ditches, concrete gouges, barbed wire, engineering traps. They were at the entrance to each pillbox. Imagine, from the armored door inside the pillbox there is a bridge that will immediately capsize under the feet of the uninitiated, and he will inevitably fall into a deep concrete well, from where he can no longer rise alive. At great depths, the pillboxes are connected by passages to underground labyrinths.

So why was the Earthworm City built? Has he deployed a network of underground cities and communications all the way to Berlin? And isn't here, in Kenshitsa, the key to unraveling the mystery of the concealment and disappearance of the "Amber Room", other treasures stolen in the countries of Eastern Europe and, above all, Russia? Perhaps the "Regenwurmlager" is one of the objects of preparation of Nazi Germany for the possession of an atomic bomb? And today, daredevils, adventurers and dreamers go there to try to make a discovery and answer those questions that are in this story.

Eight kilometers from the Ukrainian regional center of Vinnitsa there is a place that has also been haunting the minds of researchers and journalists for more than half a century. The locals call him "bad". And the late Bulgarian clairvoyant Vanga warned that here "mortal danger lies in wait for everyone." During the Second World War, Hitler's underground command post "Werwolf" was built here. Since then, the most gloomy beliefs have been circulating about this area.

Under the remains of monolithic slabs and stone walls, preserved on a hundred hectares, at a depth of tens of meters, according to the same seer Vanga, "a most dangerous disease lurked." Perhaps it is located in preserved granite dungeons, multi-tiered residential and service buildings with once autonomous power and water supply, a system of radiation and bacteriological protection, and powerful long-distance communication equipment. Or maybe in the top-secret facility N3 on the second underground floor, which, apparently, so far no one has been able to penetrate.

The researchers claim that under a thick layer of sandstone, in rocky soil at the level of the third underground floor, there was a railway line, along which some mysterious cargo was brought. The thickness of the walls of the underground structure reached five meters, and its floors - eight! Why such power?

According to documents that were once leaked to the press, more than four thousand people were involved in its construction. Mostly prisoners. The Germans did not leave any of them alive. Many German specialists also worked. Most of them were also destroyed. They rest in several mass graves in the villages closest to the "Werewolf". As the old-timers said: “The prisoners were placed here nearby, across the river - in cowsheds and stables. It was the winter of 1942, terribly frosty and snowy. How they, the poor, suffered! Half-dressed, hungry. They fell right on the ground. They were driven to work in columns, in a cordon of dogs and submachine gunners. Those who fell and could no longer move were shot.

Here is what Elena Lukashevna Deminskaya, one of the three surviving residents of the villages of Strizhavka and Kolo-Mikhailovka, who were involved by the Germans in the construction of Hitler's headquarters, once said. “I cleaned the bark of felled trees, cut down knots and branches. And why the Nazis needed these pines and oaks further - I don’t know. There were several barriers. We worked in the second ring. The logs were loaded onto carts, and the prisoners carried them deep into the forest. In my opinion, almost all of them did not return back. What they killed (did) there - we could only think and guess. One of our rural lads, partisans from the Black Forest, one night came to ask for bread and potatoes and talked about deep pits and concrete burrows under the ground.

Nobody let us in there. Everywhere towers with machine guns, bunkers. The passes that were given to us, the guards asked at every step: "Uterus, document." So we tied these pieces of paper right on our foreheads and didn’t take them off all day - breathe, damned, so that your eyes popped out.

Somehow, it was already in the summer of 1942, I weeded potatoes and I saw: fifteen cars drove towards the forest - I counted it myself. Around motorcycles with machine guns, armored cars. Then they talked in the village, the Fuhrer himself came to visit with his stash.

“It was beautiful on the territory of the bunker - grass was sown all around, flower beds. And even a marble swimming pool. More than once I got into the territory of the bunker - I brought cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, milk to the Germans, ”adds the second survivor, an old friend of E. Deminskaya, Elena Nikolaevna Beregelya.

“We drove the collective farm,” Beregelya said. - We have a collective farm named after Ilyich and acted in the occupation. The men are all at war, and we were cattlemen, and riders, and loaders. And where to go? If you refuse, they will shoot you. The Germans had to be fed. Maybe Hitler himself with his wife. They say that in the depths of the forest, even behind the fence with wires through which the current was passed, there was a pool where they swam. But even a fly could not fly there, so everyone was guarded.

Historical documents testify that for the first time the Fuhrer was at his Vinnitsa headquarters in July-October 1942, for the second time - in August 1943 and stayed for about a month. Eva Braun was also with him. Here Hitler received the Japanese ambassador, handed the iron cross to ace pilot Franz Berenbrock, who shot down more than a hundred aircraft. Another question - what, besides managing military operations, did the Fuhrer do in his huge headquarters, built to last for centuries, with its underground labyrinths of hundreds and hundreds of meters? Himmler personally dealt with the issues of protecting the object, at his direction, anti-aircraft installations shot down any, even their own, aircraft that appeared on the outskirts of the bunker.

There are many versions, and one is more contradictory and seems to be even more absurd than the other. Studies of the "Werwolf" (preserved by blowing up all the entrances) were carried out in the 60s, and in 1989-1990 - as part of the comprehensive program "Hermes". After drilling, echolocation, reconnaissance and surveys of the terrain from satellites, and other studies, the expeditions urgently left, taking with them classified data, which we are unlikely to get acquainted with in full soon. Have scientists and intelligence agencies penetrated the bunker itself and its object N3, which, as they say, is perceived from space as a solid black spot? What is hidden in it? Reich gold, or maybe the Amber Room? After all, nearby, in the village of Klesovo, Rivne region, the Germans were actively developing deposits of amber, which was considered the "Aryan stone". By the way, the secret of the bunker of the head of the Reichskommissariat of Ukraine, General Erich Koch, who was in Rivne in a massive building, has not yet been disclosed. There is a version that part of the Amber Room is hidden in its and neighboring water-filled dungeons.

For some reason, not for Koch, but for the Deputy Minister of Finance of the Reich Gel, the legendary Nikolai Kuznetsov hunted - and killed him. Gel, according to sources, was supposed to develop the production of amber jewelry in these places, and he needed the exhibits of the Amber Room as examples of perfection. There were many witnesses left in Rovno who saw how in the dead of night from the side of the station in the direction of the Gauleiter bunker a convoy of cars without numbers, loaded with boxes, was driving. The trucks returned empty.

Those who visited this place talk about the scarcity, some kind of sickness of the local nature, the stuntedness of trees and shrubs throughout the Werewolf, although a hundred meters from here, trees grow luxuriantly. It is not for nothing that they believe in the whole district that here is "a bad place, dark, evil."

A full member of the Geographical Society of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ivan Koltsov, at one time the head of the secret dowsing department under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, studied the dungeons of the Werewolf. Here is his commentary for Trud.

“Among the underground structures built by the Nazis during the Second World War, there are those that are of particular interest and are covered with a dense veil of secrecy. These are the strategic command posts of the Nazi troops, usually referred to as Hitler's headquarters. In total, as you know, there were seven of them: “Felsennest” (“Nest in the rocks”) on the mountainous right bank of the Rhine; “Tannenberg” (“Spruce Mountain”) in the mountain forests of the Black Forest; “Wolfshluht” (“Wolf Gorge”) on the former Franco - the Belgian border near the town of Prue-de-Pech; "Werwolf" ("Werewolf") in the Vinnitsa region; "Berenhalle" ("Bear Hall") three kilometers from Smolensk; "Rere" (Tunnel) in Galicia and "Wolfschanze" ("Wolf's Lair") - in East Prussia, seven kilometers from Rastenburg (now the Polish city of Kentszyn).

Perhaps, more than others, the “Werwolf” headquarters, 8 kilometers from Vinnitsa, is shrouded in a fog of mystery. It was erected in an extremely short time - less than a year. Hitler led his army from here from July to October 1942. The location of the object was also not chosen by chance. Traditions say that in ancient times there were religious buildings of our ancestors with strong positive energy.

Thousands of Soviet prisoners of war worked at underground work. All of them, plus hundreds of German specialists, were shot after the facility was put into operation. The case is unprecedented - the Nazis usually left "their" alive. So, the secrecy of the construction was the highest. What's the matter here? At the bet? But the builders of all other stakes were left alive. Or maybe it's the minerals that were mined during the tunneling? Or in the products that were made from this raw material in underground factories?

So far, the answers to these questions have not been found. During the research in which I happened to participate, I only managed to find out that the Werewolf dungeons have several floors at different levels with different distances from each other. All of them are interconnected by tunnels that go away from the headquarters for many kilometers, for example, towards the village of Kalinovka (15 km), where underground work was also carried out. During the retreat, many entrances to the dungeons, like the headquarters itself, were blown up by the Nazis. However, now work is underway to clear out the entrances in order to create a museum complex similar to the one that exists in Poland in the Wolf's Lair.

As for the mysterious object N3, we did not manage to get to it. However, the dowsing method behind powerful concrete walls found huge masses of metals, including precious ones - gold, platinum. Some structure of them of an incomprehensible purpose is fixed. The mystery will be solved only when it is possible to open the reinforced concrete shell of object N3. Unfortunately, even in the times of the USSR, there were not enough funds for this, at least for our expedition."

This story is rather confusing, little confirmed by evidence and ignored by official historical science. But somehow the secret of the Polish town of Kenshitsa fascinates - like the adventures of Indiana Jones, the hero of a cycle of films beloved by many. Perhaps, if Steven Spielberg knew about the memoirs of the former military prosecutor, retired Colonel of Justice Alexander Liskin, the brave American archaeologist Jones would have shown wonders of dexterity and cunning in the dungeons of northwestern Poland. Alexander Ivanovich is sure that there is an underground city of incredible scale, built by the Germans to protect their borders.

What did the military prosecutor see?

In his memoirs, Alexander Liskin tells about a trip to the Polish village of Kenshitsa, lost in the folds of the relief. It happened in the 60s of the last century. It was here, not far from the village, that the Germans at one time built their Mezeritsky fortified area, which included a defensive rampart, a military camp and other objects, from which only ruins and separate structures remained at that time. The Germans called the fortified area Regenwurmlager, that is, "Earthworm Camp".

After the war, one of the communications brigades of the Northern Group of Soviet Forces was based in the former German town, to which the military prosecutor arrived. He looked around the surroundings and Lake Kshiva, admiring its beauty and tranquility. However, Liskin did not yet realize that the subway tunnels built by the Nazis and abandoned now forever snake right under his feet!

Wanting to entertain the honored guest, the colleagues who accompanied the prosecutor showed Liskin an island on the lake and reported that it was slowly drifting over the water surface, like a raft. Kshiva had a continuation in the form of an appendix, in the center of which the guest saw a metal tower, reminiscent of the air intakes of the Moscow metro. And heaps - artificial embankments around the lake - as it turned out, are riddled with passages rushing into the depths of the earth.

Liskin knew that from the end of the war until the beginning of the 50s, the "Earthworm Camp" was abandoned, and only the Russians, having settled here, began reconnaissance of these places. First of all, sappers worked in the vicinity of the fortified area, looking for minefields and weapons depots. The fighters explored the entire area and made many amazing discoveries: for example, they found an underground power cable designed for 380 volts, a well into which a stream of water fell, and much more, indicating the presence of a large-scale underground facility. The engineers of the garrison concluded that the mysterious well was part of an autonomous power plant, and the water falling into it rotated the turbine.

Earthworm Camp (Regenwurmlager). On a surface.

They also found a disguised entrance to the tunnel, apparently equipped with traps, since one daredevil, who entered it on a motorcycle on a dare, never returned.

In the early 1950s, signalers still managed to get into the tunnel, and they were even able to walk through it for several kilometers. On their way, the military saw many branches, but did not dare to turn anywhere.

Rumors and facts

Still, it is strange that Alexander Lee skin did not try to look into the maze. The prosecutor cites the description of the “Earthworm Camp” from the words of an unnamed officer, who also did not see the Regenwurmlager himself, but only heard the stories of people who had been underground.

“Under us, as far as one can imagine, is an underground city, where there is everything necessary for an autonomous life for many years.

By the light of rechargeable lamps, people entered the underground subway. It was precisely the subway, since an underground railway track was laid along the bottom of the tunnel.

Almost immediately they discovered an underground crematorium. Perhaps it was in his ovens that the remains of the dungeon builders were burned.

The grandiose underground network remained for the uninitiated a labyrinth threatening with dangers.

It is known that the commander of the Northern Group of Forces, Colonel-General P.S., once descended into this tunnel. Maryakhin, but he did not leave his evidence.

In addition to the officer's impressions, Liskin also conveys a description of the "city" made by one of the last commanders of the Kenshitsk brigade, Colonel V.I. Spiridonov. I must say that the underground German tunnel in the 1970s has already turned into an exotic attraction, however, only for the elite - the highest officers of the Soviet army, abandoned in these places by fate and command.

Spiridonov tells about the engineer-sapper report, which stated that 44 kilometers of underground communications were examined under the garrison. The height and width of the tunnel were three meters each, the walls and ceiling of the metro were reinforced with reinforced concrete slabs, the floor was lined with stone slabs. Spiridonov himself descended into the tunnel in an army UAZ and drove 20 kilometers through the labyrinth towards Germany.

Interesting and something else. There were many preserved and destroyed wartime objects built of reinforced concrete around the lake. Powerful pillboxes were equipped with large-caliber machine guns and cannons, and under them, floors where barracks and warehouses were located went to a depth of 50 meters. Ground and underground structures were connected to each other and to the labyrinths of the subway.

Both the Germans who built the Regenwurmlager and the Russians who dug it out, information about the tunnel was carefully concealed from both local residents and the local government. It is known that only one Polish local historian, Dr. Podbelsky, was actively interested in the labyrinth, but he explored it only in the first post-war years, before the Russian garrison was located in the German military town.

In the 1980s, Podbelsky was over 80, and he said that the construction of this facility began in 1927, and from 1937 work went at a high speed, as Hitler was preparing for war. The local historian claimed that the Fuhrer himself came here from Berlin - along the rails of the underground road. And hidden subway communications lead to secret factories and strategic storage facilities five kilometers from Lake Kshiva.

And this lake is also a secret. The area of ​​Kshiva is more than 200 thousand meters, and the depth scale is from three to 20 meters. On its silted bottom, many fishermen noticed a large hatch, which, perhaps, should have been hidden under that same floating island. This hatch could serve as a kingston for emergency flooding of the labyrinth, but in January 1945 the Germans probably had no time for flooding.

In 1992, the Russians left Kenshitsa, leaving the Poles with the mysteries of the underground labyrinth.

Is all this possible?

Usually, if official science is silent about something impressive, then this fact is either complete nonsense or one hundred percent true, but somehow connected with modern people and realities.

One can only guess why Earthworm Camp is so little explored. And at your leisure, it’s worth considering - how was the Regenwurmlager built in general?

And why didn't the Germans build such a labyrinth in Germany? At the time of its construction, Poland was a free country (from 1921 to 1939), which could have become an obstacle to such an active work of the Germans. And Germany itself in 1927 was barely getting back on its feet after the First World War, having received billions of dollars in loans from the USA and Great Britain in 1924. It is unlikely that the German government had enough funds for such a large-scale event.

The idea itself - to organize a metro in a neighboring state - seems very strange. If the labyrinth was built for defensive purposes, in case, as Liskin said, “if the war rolls back,” then it turns out that the Nazis did not manage to use the possibilities of the underground city. They saved some military units, but this did not lead to radical changes on the fronts. Was it worth it in this case to “bother” and dig all these many-kilometer tunnels?

Disappeared in an unknown direction

But there was another mysterious fact that even military historians could not explain, but which is fully explained by the existence of underground German communications in the Kenshitsa area. During the fighting in 1945, the 44th Guards Tank Brigade of the First Guards Tank Army of General M.E. fought in these places. Katukov. The brigade met with two German regiments, the school of the SS division "Totenkopf" and parts of the support services. The Germans quickly realized that it was impossible to resist our tanks, and ... disappeared in just a few hours. How did the Nazis do this, given that the retreat routes were already cut off? Maybe the Regenwurmlager helped the Nazis escape.

By the way, especially inquisitive readers of "Secrets" can be advised to search the Internet for a video filmed in the places described.

It remains to be hoped that Polish historians will be able to reveal to us the mysteries of the "Earthworm Camp" and explain when and why this fortified area was built. We can't wait for the next Indiana Jones movie!

During the Second World War and after it, according to the degree of advancement of Soviet troops in the territory occupied by the Nazis, stories began to appear, testimonies of those who encountered and saw with their own eyes the underground structures created by the Nazis. To this day, the purpose of some of them remains unknown and excites historians with its mysteries.

In Poland and Germany, there are still legends about mysterious underground fortifications lost in the forests of northwestern Poland and designated on Wehrmacht maps as the "Earthworm Camp". This concrete and reinforced underground city remains to this day one of the terra incognita. According to the testimonies of those who visited there in the 60s of the last century, this area appeared as a small settlement lost in the folds of the relief of northwestern Poland, which, as it seemed, had been forgotten by everyone.
Around are gloomy, impenetrable forests, small rivers and lakes, old minefields, gouges, nicknamed "dragon's teeth", and ditches of Wehrmacht fortified areas broken by Soviet troops overgrown with thistles. Concrete, barbed wire, mossy ruins - all these are the remains of a powerful defensive rampart, which once had the goal of "covering" the fatherland in case the war rolls back. The Germans called Mendzizhech Mezeritz. The fortified area, which also absorbed Kenshitsa, is Mezeritsky. Here, on a patch of Europe little known to the world, the military talked about the secret of the forest lake Kshiva, located somewhere nearby, in the salary of a deaf coniferous forest. But no details. More like rumors, speculation...

At that time, a five-battalion brigade was stationed there, stationed in a former German military town, hidden from prying eyes in a green forest. Once it was this place that was marked on the Wehrmacht maps with the toponym "Regenwurmlager" - "Earthworm Camp".
According to the stories of local residents, there were no protracted battles here, the Germans could not withstand the onslaught. When it became clear to them that the garrison (two regiments, the school of the SS division "Dead Head" and support units) could be surrounded, he urgently evacuated. It is hard to imagine how it was possible for almost a whole division to escape from this natural trap in a few hours. And where? If the only road was already intercepted by the tanks of the 44th Guards Tank Brigade of the First Guards Tank Army of General M. E. Katukov of the Soviet troops.

The amazing beauty of the Kenshitsa forest lake is everywhere surrounded by signs of mystery, which, it seems, even the air is saturated here. From 1945 until almost the end of the 1950s, this place was, in fact, only under the supervision of the security department of the city of Mendzizhech - where, as they say, a Polish officer named Telyutko supervised him in his service - and the commander stationed somewhere near the Polish artillery regiment.
With their direct participation, the temporary transfer of the territory of the former German military camp to the Soviet communications brigade was carried out. A convenient town fully met the requirements and seemed to be all at a glance. At the same time, the prudent command of the brigade decided at the same time not to violate the rules for quartering troops and ordered a thorough engineering and sapper reconnaissance in the garrison and the surrounding area.

It was then that the discoveries began that struck the imagination of even experienced front-line soldiers who were still serving at that time. Let's start with the fact that near the lake, in a reinforced concrete box, an insulated 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 Mendzizhech.

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 of the brigade were unable to verify these assumptions. Parts of the SS that were in the camp on the fateful days of the 45th, as if sunk into the water. Since it was impossible to bypass the lake around the perimeter due to the impassability of the forest, the military decided to do it by water. In a few hours they rounded the lake and walked in close proximity to the shore. From the eastern side of the lake rose several powerful, already overgrown with undergrowth hills-heaps.
In some places, artillery caponiers were guessed in them, facing the front to the east and south. I also managed to notice two small lakes similar to puddles. Shields with inscriptions in two languages ​​towered nearby: “Danger! Mines!

The military then said that the heaps were Egyptian pyramids. Inside them, it seemed, there were various secret passages, manholes. Through them, from under the ground, Soviet radio relayers, when arranging the garrison, got facing slabs. They said that "there" are real galleries. As for these puddles, then, according to the sappers, these are the flooded entrances to the underground city. There was another mystery there - an island in the middle of the lake. The military noticed that this island is not really an island in the usual sense. He swims, or rather, slowly drifts, standing as if at anchor.

Here is how one of the witnesses described this island: “The floating island is overgrown with firs and willows. Its area did not exceed fifty square meters, and it seemed that it really slowly and heavily swayed on the black water of a still reservoir. The forest lake also had a clearly artificial southwestern and southern extension, reminiscent of an appendix. Here the pole went two or three meters deep, the water was relatively clear, but the lush and fern-like algae completely covered the bottom. In the middle of this bay, a gray reinforced concrete tower rose gloomily, clearly once having a special purpose. Looking at it, I remembered the air intakes of the Moscow metro, accompanying its deep tunnels. Through the narrow window it was clear that there was water inside the concrete tower. There was no doubt: somewhere below me there was an underground structure, which for some reason had to be erected right here, in remote places near Mendzizhech.. During one of the numerous engineering reconnaissance, sappers revealed the entrance to the tunnel disguised as a hill. Already at the first approximation, it became clear that this was a serious structure, moreover, probably with various kinds of traps, including mines. For obvious reasons, information about this unusual expedition remained confidential at the time.

One of the members of one of the search groups, technician-captain Cherepanov later said that after one pillbox, they descended deep into the ground along steel spiral staircases. By the light of acid lamps we entered the underground metro. It was precisely 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. Probably, the locomotive here was driven by electricity.

The group entered the tunnel not at the beginning. The beginning of the tunnel was somewhere under the forest lake. The other part was directed to the west - to the Oder River. Almost immediately discovered an underground crematorium. Slowly, with precautionary measures, the search party moved through the tunnel in the direction of modern Germany. Soon they stopped counting the tunnel branches - dozens of them were discovered. Both right and left. But most of the branches were neatly walled up. Perhaps these were approaches to unknown objects, including parts of the underground city. The grandiose underground network remained for the uninitiated a labyrinth threatening many dangers. It was not possible to test it thoroughly. It was dry in the tunnel - a sign of good waterproofing. It seemed that from the other, unknown, side, the lights of a train or a large truck were about to appear (vehicles could also move there). According to Cherepanov, it was a man-made underground world, which is an excellent implementation of engineering. The captain said that the group moved slowly and after a few hours of being underground began to lose the feeling of really passed.

Some of its participants came up with the idea that the study of a mothballed underground city, laid under forests, fields and rivers, is a task for specialists of a different level. This different level required a lot of effort, money and time. According to military estimates, the subway could stretch for tens of kilometers and "dive" under the Oder. Where further and where its final station - it was difficult even to guess.

Gradually, a new vision of this unusual military riddle took shape. It turned out that in the period from 1958 to 1992, the five-battalion brigade changed nine commanders in turn, and each of them - like it or not - had to adapt to the neighborhood with this unsolved underground territory.
According to the engineering and sapper conclusion, 44 kilometers of underground communications were discovered and examined under the garrison alone. According to one of the officers who served in the Soviet garrison, the height and width of the underground metro shaft are approximately three meters. The neck smoothly lowers and dives underground to a depth of fifty meters. There, the tunnels branch and intersect, there are transport interchanges. The walls and ceiling of the subway are made of reinforced concrete slabs, the floor is lined with rectangular stone slabs. According to a Polish local historian, Dr. Podbelsky, who has been studying this city for many years, the Germans began building this strategic object as early as 1927, but most actively since 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany. In 1937, the latter personally arrived at the camp from Berlin and, as they claimed, along the rails of a secret subway. In fact, from that moment on, the hidden city was considered handed over to the use of the Wehrmacht and the SS. Through some hidden communications, the giant facility was connected to the plant and strategic storage facilities, also underground, located in the area of ​​the villages of Vysoka and Peski, which is two to five kilometers west and north of the lake.

Lake Kshiva itself is an integral part of the mystery. The area of ​​its mirror is at least 200 thousand square meters, and the depth scale is from 3 (in the south and west) to 20 meters (in the east). It was in its eastern part that some Soviet servicemen managed in the summer, under favorable lighting, to see something on the silty bottom, in its outlines and other features resembling a very large hatch, which received the nickname “the eye of the underworld” from the servicemen. The so-called "eye" was tightly closed. Was it not at one time that the floating island already mentioned above should have covered him from the gaze of a pilot and a heavy bomb?
What could such a hatch be used for? Most likely, he served as a kingston for emergency flooding of part or all of the underground structures. But if the hatch is closed to this day, it means that it was not used in January 1945. Thus, it cannot be ruled out that the underground city is not flooded, but mothballed "until a special occasion." Does its underground horizons store something? Who are they waiting for? Around the lake, in the forest, there are many preserved and destroyed wartime objects.
Among them are the ruins of a rifle complex and a hospital for the elite of the SS troops. Everything was made of reinforced concrete and refractory bricks. And most importantly - powerful pillboxes. Their reinforced concrete and steel domes were once armed with heavy machine guns and cannons, equipped with semi-automatic ammunition feed mechanisms. Under the meter-long armor of these caps, underground floors went to a depth of up to 30-50 meters, where sleeping and amenity premises, ammunition and food depots, as well as communication centers were located.

The approaches to these deadly firing points were securely covered by minefields, ditches, concrete gouges, barbed wire, engineering traps. They were at the entrance to each pillbox. Imagine, from the armored door inside the pillbox there is a bridge that will immediately capsize under the feet of the uninitiated, and he will inevitably fall into a deep concrete well, from where he can no longer rise alive. At great depths, the pillboxes are connected by passages to underground labyrinths.

So why was the Earthworm City built? Has he deployed a network of underground cities and communications all the way to Berlin? And isn't here, in Kenshitsa, the key to unraveling the mystery of the concealment and disappearance of the "Amber Room", other treasures stolen in the countries of Eastern Europe and, above all, Russia? Perhaps the "Regenwurmlager" is one of the objects of preparation of Nazi Germany for the possession of an atomic bomb? And today, daredevils, adventurers and dreamers go there to try to make a discovery and answer those questions that are in this story.

Eight kilometers from the Ukrainian regional center of Vinnitsa there is a place that has also been haunting the minds of researchers and journalists for more than half a century. The locals call him "bad". And the late Bulgarian clairvoyant Vanga warned that here "mortal danger lies in wait for everyone." During the Second World War, Hitler's underground command post "Werwolf" was built here. Since then, the most gloomy beliefs have been circulating about this area.

Under the remains of monolithic slabs and stone walls, preserved on a hundred hectares, at a depth of tens of meters, according to the same seer Vanga, "a most dangerous disease lurked." Perhaps it is located in preserved granite dungeons, multi-tiered residential and service buildings with once autonomous power and water supply, a system of radiation and bacteriological protection, and powerful long-distance communication equipment. Or maybe in the top-secret facility N3 on the second underground floor, which, apparently, so far no one has been able to penetrate.

The researchers claim that under a thick layer of sandstone, in rocky soil at the level of the third underground floor, there was a railway line, along which some mysterious cargo was brought. The thickness of the walls of the underground structure reached five meters, and its floors - eight! Why such power?
According to documents that were once leaked to the press, more than four thousand people were involved in its construction. Mostly prisoners. The Germans did not leave any of them alive. Many German specialists also worked. Most of them were also destroyed. They rest in several mass graves in the villages closest to the "Werewolf". As the old-timers said: “The prisoners were placed here nearby, across the river - in cowsheds and stables. It was the winter of 1942, terribly frosty and snowy. How they, the poor, suffered! Half-dressed, hungry. They fell right on the ground. They were driven to work in columns, in a cordon of dogs and submachine gunners. Those who fell and could no longer move were shot.”

Here is what Elena Lukashevna Deminskaya, one of the three surviving residents of the villages of Strizhavka and Kolo-Mikhailovka, who were involved by the Germans in the construction of Hitler's headquarters, once said. “I cleaned the bark of felled trees, cut down knots and branches. And why the Nazis needed these pines and oaks further - I don’t know. There were several barriers. We worked in the second ring. The logs were loaded onto carts, and the prisoners carried them deep into the forest. In my opinion, almost all of them did not return back. What they killed (did) there - we could only think and guess. One of our rural lads, partisans from the Black Forest, one night came to ask for bread and potatoes and talked about deep pits and concrete burrows under the ground.

Nobody let us in there. Everywhere towers with machine guns, bunkers. The passes that were given to us, the guards asked at every step: "Uterus, document." So we tied these pieces of paper right on our foreheads and didn’t take them off all day - breathe, damned, so that your eyes popped out.

Somehow, it was already in the summer of 1942, I weeded potatoes and I saw: fifteen cars drove towards the forest - I counted it myself. Around motorcycles with machine guns, armored cars. Then they talked in the village, the Fuhrer himself came to visit with his stash.

“It was beautiful on the territory of the bunker - grass was sown all around, flower beds. And even a marble swimming pool. More than once I got into the territory of the bunker - I brought cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, milk to the Germans ", - complements the second surviving, longtime friend of E. Deminskaya Elena Nikolaevna Beregelya.

“We drove the collective farm, Beregel said. - In our country, the collective farm named after Ilyich also acted in the occupation. The men are all at war, and we were cattlemen, and riders, and loaders. And where to go? If you refuse, they will shoot you. The Germans had to be fed. Maybe Hitler himself with his wife. They say that in the depths of the forest, even behind the fence with wires through which the current was passed, there was a pool where they swam. But even a fly could not fly there, so everyone was guarded..

Historical documents testify that for the first time the Fuhrer was at his Vinnitsa headquarters in July-October 1942, for the second time - in August 1943 and stayed for about a month. Eva Braun was also with him. Here Hitler received the Japanese ambassador, handed the iron cross to ace pilot Franz Berenbrock, who shot down more than a hundred aircraft. Another question - what, besides managing military operations, did the Fuhrer do in his huge headquarters, built to last for centuries, with its underground labyrinths of hundreds and hundreds of meters? Himmler personally dealt with the issues of protecting the object, at his direction, anti-aircraft installations shot down any, even their own, aircraft that appeared on the outskirts of the bunker.
There are many versions, and one is more contradictory and seems to be even more absurd than the other. Studies of the "Werwolf" (preserved by blowing up all the entrances) were carried out in the 60s, and in 1989-1990 - as part of the comprehensive program "Hermes". After drilling, echolocation, reconnaissance and surveys of the terrain from satellites, and other studies, the expeditions urgently left, taking with them classified data, which we are unlikely to get acquainted with in full soon.
Have scientists and intelligence agencies penetrated the bunker itself and its object N3, which, as they say, is perceived from space as a solid black spot? What is hidden in it? Reich gold, or maybe the Amber Room? After all, nearby, in the village of Klesovo, Rivne region, the Germans were actively developing deposits of amber, which was considered the "Aryan stone". By the way, the secret of the bunker of the head of the Reichskommissariat of Ukraine, General Erich Koch, who was in Rivne in a massive building, has not yet been disclosed. There is a version that part of the Amber Room is hidden in its and neighboring water-filled dungeons.

For some reason, not for Koch, but for the Deputy Minister of Finance of the Reich Gel, the legendary Nikolai Kuznetsov hunted - and killed him. Gel, according to sources, was supposed to develop the production of amber jewelry in these places, and he needed the exhibits of the Amber Room as examples of perfection. There were many witnesses left in Rovno who saw how in the dead of night from the side of the station in the direction of the Gauleiter bunker a convoy of cars without numbers, loaded with boxes, was driving. The trucks returned empty.

Those who visited this place talk about the scarcity, some kind of sickness of the local nature, the stuntedness of trees and shrubs throughout the Werewolf, although a hundred meters from here, trees grow luxuriantly. It is not for nothing that they believe in the whole district that here is "a bad place, dark, evil."
A full member of the Geographical Society of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ivan Koltsov, at one time the head of the secret dowsing department under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, studied the dungeons of the Werewolf. Here is his commentary for Trud:
“Among the underground structures built by the Nazis during the Second World War, there are those that are of particular interest and are covered with a dense veil of secrecy. These are the strategic command posts of the Nazi troops, usually referred to as Hitler's headquarters. In total, as you know, there were seven of them: “Felsennest” (“Nest in the rocks”) on the mountainous right bank of the Rhine; “Tannenberg” (“Spruce Mountain”) in the mountain forests of the Black Forest; “Wolfshluht” (“Wolf Gorge”) on the former Franco - the Belgian border near the town of Prue-de-Pech; "Werwolf" ("Werewolf") in the Vinnitsa region; "Berenhalle" ("Bear Hall") three kilometers from Smolensk; "Rere" (Tunnel) in Galicia and "Wolfschanze" ("Wolf's Lair") - in East Prussia, seven kilometers from Rastenburg (now the Polish city of Kentszyn).

Perhaps, more than others, the “Werwolf” headquarters, 8 kilometers from Vinnitsa, is shrouded in a fog of mystery. It was erected in an extremely short time - less than a year. Hitler led his army from here from July to October 1942. The location of the object was also not chosen by chance. Traditions say that in ancient times there were religious buildings of our ancestors with strong positive energy.

Thousands of Soviet prisoners of war worked at underground work. All of them, plus hundreds of German specialists, were shot after the facility was put into operation. The case is unprecedented - the Nazis usually left "their" alive. So, the secrecy of the construction was the highest. What's the matter here? At the bet? But the builders of all other stakes were left alive. Or maybe it's the minerals that were mined during the tunneling? Or in the products that were made from this raw material in underground factories?

So far, the answers to these questions have not been found. During the research in which I happened to participate, I only managed to find out that the Werewolf dungeons have several floors at different levels with different distances from each other. All of them are interconnected by tunnels that go away from the headquarters for many kilometers, for example, towards the village of Kalinovka (15 km), where underground work was also carried out. During the retreat, many entrances to the dungeons, like the headquarters itself, were blown up by the Nazis. However, work is now underway to clear out the entrances in order to create a museum complex similar to the one that exists in Poland in the Wolf's Lair.

As for the mysterious object N3, we did not manage to get to it. However, the dowsing method behind powerful concrete walls found huge masses of metals, including precious ones - gold, platinum. Some structure of them of an incomprehensible purpose is fixed. The mystery will be solved only when it is possible to open the reinforced concrete shell of object N3. Unfortunately, even in the times of the USSR, there were not enough funds for this, at least for our expedition."

The Lair of the Earthworm, also known as the Mezeritsky fortified area, is a legendary underground fortress built by the Germans in the 30s of the twentieth century.
Located at that time on the eastern border of Germany, it was called upon to protect an important section of the border, passing in close proximity to Berlin.
The system has more than fifty armored reinforced concrete objects, dozens of kilometers of underground tunnels, a system of dams, drawbridges, dams and water channels, stretching for more than 80 kilometers.

The system is a set of ground fortified structures interconnected by underground tunnels.
Nature here is incredible...

A paved road leads deep into the pine forest, which has stuck around the steep hills.

Already here you begin to feel that the forest is not so simple. Every now and then, overgrown branches look to the sides, and somewhere old railway tracks cross the road.
A lot of pillboxes and other smaller surprises are hidden in the forest.

Anti-tank dragon teeth

As well as remarkably preserved pins and thorns

After the end of World War I, France became the main enemy of Germany. Germany begins to strengthen the borders on the eastern side, where the border with Poland, an ally of France, passed. In the 1920s, relations with Poland became especially tense, and in 1928 the first fortification work began in the East. Due to the Treaty of Versailles, at first only light defensive facilities are built here.
On October 30, 1935, A. Hitler visits the fortified area, and, amazed at the scope of the construction, gives his consent in principle to the construction of the fortified area.

Dot 739

He is from the rear

Underground pillboxes are connected by system tunnels, the location of which can be seen on the diagram.

After the Fuhrer's visit, the concept of the defensive system was significantly updated. The length of the defense lines was to be 110 km, with a front depth of 3 km, the garrison - 2 infantry divisions consisting of approximately 35,000 people, of which one third was the permanent garrison of the fortress. To ensure high defense capability, the most advanced technologies for that period were used, including automatic guns retracting over the pillbox, flamethrowers with a range of up to 75 meters, mortars, etc.

Let's teleport inside the LDCH and take a walk through the tunnels. The scale of the building is amazing...

From March 1935, the Germans began to build the underground part of the complex - the Earthworm Camp. Especially for the delivery of building materials, a road was built, leading to the fortified area, bypassing settlements, to maintain secrecy. At the initial stage, LDCH was built using an open method, which was extremely laborious. Since April 1936, construction began with the help of two tunneling shields, which accelerated the volume of the daily passage of the tunnel to 65 meters.

Human walker to pillbox on the surface

On the horizon in front of us, someone flashed a lantern. They could not catch up, the distance in the giant straight tunnel seems to be less than in reality.

Thanks to strangers for the backlight)

On May 30, 1938, Hitler again inspects the LDCH, and a month later, due to the loss of relevance of the attack from France, work was suspended ...

In this form, this great fortification has survived to this day, becoming the most expensive place for the overnight stay of bats from all over Europe)