If a person is obsessed with the idea of running the planet, then he behaves like a master on it. Adolf Hitler's maniacal globalism manifested itself not only in military operations, but also in how he was going to hold the conquered positions, as well as preserve his own life and the necessary associates. The massive top-secret underground complex known as the Riese ("Giant") project was originally one of the strategic points, becoming the top-secret safe haven where the Führer himself intended to hide during adversity.
Somewhere in the mountains of Poland
The location of the object has long been widely known - eighty kilometers southwest of the city of Wroclaw, under one of the oldest mountain ranges in Poland, known as the Owls.
The place was chosen carefully and, undoubtedly, successfully - a compact, steep massif, mostly overgrown with an impassable old spruce forest, stretches along the Czech border. However, these are only general coordinates. How far the builders managed to go, erecting secret and fortified premises, is still not known for sure.
What Hitler Was Building
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In 1943, a turning point occurred during the war, the advantage of the Nazis ceased to be unambiguous. The opposition to the Third Reich was increasingly felt. It was then that Hitler ordered one of the most ambitious and manic ideas and the greatest mysteries of the Second World War, about which suspiciously little has become known over the decades since then, to be realized.
When the Allies began air raids on Germany, the Third Reich made efforts to decentralize its infrastructure and move it to secret underground locations.
Under the Sowa Mountains, 90,000 m3 of concrete tunnels were built with seven main access points to individual systems located in Valim Rechka, Jugovice, Wlodarc, Sobon (Ramenberg), Sokolc, Osowka and Ksi Castle.
Based on the time of the beginning of the work and their similarity to other sites, it is widely believed that the Riese complex, at least initially, was intended to house underground weapons factories. Several large companies and enterprises were transferred to the region (including the Krupp engineering plant, which produced parts for the Me-262 jet fighter), they were temporarily located nearby, awaiting the readiness of an underground facility in the mountains.
In the spring of 1944, the direction of the project seems to have changed. Two kilometers of tunnels were cut in the rock under the Ksie castle and a 50-meter elevator shaft was dug. According to documents of the period, memoirs and testimonies, the castle and the premises under it were to serve as a secret headquarters for Hitler and his closest henchmen, while the rest of the complex was intended for the Wehrmacht.
Now, in addition to the main connections in the mountains, you can find many eerie abandoned military barracks, bunkers, warehouses, building materials, excavations and tunnels, most of which are barricaded, covered with bricks or blocked with hardened cement, sometimes even filled with water.
Secret Object Builders
In the early stages, construction work was carried out by Polish, Italian and Soviet prisoners of war from the AL Riese labor camp, a satellite of the nearby Gross-Rosen concentration camp.
Typhoid fever was rampant among the builders, shoots were frequent, and progress was slow. In April 1944, a disgruntled Hitler ordered the transfer of the project to a company headed by Albert Speer, the Fuehrer's chief architect and engineer. Hitler ordered that the prisoners of Gross-Rosen, primarily Polish, Hungarian and Italian Jews, should also be used as underground workers.
Tens of thousands of prisoners were never found - neither alive nor in mass graves, and this allowed a terrifying but plausible assumption to be made that they were buried alive in the unfinished tunnels of their own shelter, being driven into the complex before it exploded.
The Riese project in numbers
As the defeat of the fascist troops became more frequent and devastating, there was a growing general opinion among Hitler's subordinates that the expensive project was not only insane, but also impossible to complete. According to the memoirs of Hitler's adjutant, Nikolaus von Below, he repeatedly tried to convince the Fuhrer and Speer to abandon the project.
According to his own recollections, Speer admits that he had distrust of the project then, but he did not want to shirk his responsibilities. At a briefing on June 20, 1944, Hitler received a report on the current situation on the progress of construction.
- Around 28,000 workers were employed to expand the headquarters.
- The construction of the bunkers in Kentszyn (Hitler's famous quarters in eastern Poland, known as the "Wolf's Lair") cost 36 million marks.
- The bunkers in Pullach, which provided Hitler's safety when he was in Munich, cost 13 million marks.
- The Riese bunker system cost 150 million marks.
These projects required 257,000 m3 of reinforced concrete, 213,000 m3 of tunnels, 58 km of roads with six bridges and 100 km of pipeline. More concrete was used for the construction of the Riese bomb shelters alone than was allocated in 1944 for the entire population.
Freeze construction
Despite all possible efforts made to expedite the completion of construction, it was not completed before adverse changes took place on the Eastern Front. In January 1945, the Soviet army marched quickly and purposefully across Eastern Europe to Berlin, but the Owls did not lie on its route. This allowed the SS unit to remain in Valim-Rechka until May.
By this time, they managed to brick up or destroy the entrances to the underground fortress. Everything that was there (or was not) disappeared under rocks and dust, as well as the estimated thousands of prisoners of war (according to various estimates from 7,000 to 30,000). It should be noted that Speer's calculations for the complex's 213,000 m3 of tunnels raises the question of where at least 115,000 m3 more pass if less than 100,000 are known today. Much of the system may still not be open.
Many facts and evidence confirm this probability, but the danger of landslides does not make it possible to explore the area at the proper level. It is assumed that all of the tunnels were eventually to be connected. This is supported by the illogical and unfinished individual sections, the presence of underground narrow-gauge railways, as well as an extensive system of water and sewer pipes that does not seem to lead anywhere.
A real object of extraordinary importance or a skillful hoax
There is very little first-hand information about this place and its purpose. Conspiracy theories abound, and many believe the Nazis spread the idea that Riese was intended as a headquarters to hide their true intentions.
Some sensationalists believe that superweapons were developed here, while others support the assumption of Nazi treasures buried in the mountains, still buried deep under the rock, including the missing gold and cultural treasures from Wroclaw, as well as even the famous Amber Room, which disappeared from St. Petersburg during the war.
The Golden Train and its Quest
In August 2015, two men stated that they had information on the whereabouts of the "Nazi gold train" from a confession on their deathbed. Treasure hunters have entered into negotiations with the Polish government, demanding a 10% share of everything discovered based on their information, which they supplemented with radar images showing that a similar object is underground, in a place known to them.
These claims have caused worldwide public outcry and active discussion in the media. As a result, the Polish government and military conducted a non-invasive investigation of the site, which led to the conclusion that no "golden train" existed.
Two men with claims of knowledge of the site's location received work permits and private sponsorship in the amount of € 116,000. A year after the start of the discussion of the issue (in August 2016), they began to search, but the work was stopped a week later, when neither a tunnel, nor a train, nor treasures were found, and what was considered a legendary train on the radar images turned out to be natural ice formations.
Yet for dozens of treasure hunters, the search for the gold train in the mountains continues, and media coverage has boosted tourism to the area by about 45%. The result was an apt remark by one of the local officials, who noticed that regardless of whether there is something worthy of attention in the mountains, the "golden train" has already arrived in the region, thanks to the many visitors.
If you are a tourist
Of the seven primary sites included in the complex, three are now open to the public - in Valim Rechka, Wlodarc and Osowka. Advertised as tourist attractions by private companies, they are more entertaining than educational, adding mystery instead of trying to uncover the secrets of the scary place.
Osówka is the largest complex with the largest number of tourists, while Włodarz / Wolfsburg has turned into a vacation spot - here you can relax, visit an unusual museum, and it is often used as a paintball battlefield. For a territory where thousands of prisoners were killed and killed, the choice seems more than dubious.
Author: Natalia Milovanova