No matter what they say, one thing is indisputable: there is no more extensive and more ramified underground fortification 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, stretching for tens (!) Kilometers …
No one could say for what purpose the two-track narrow-gauge railways were laid in them, where and why the electric trains ran away through endless tunnels with countless branches, dead ends, what they transported on their platforms, who was the 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".
Third Reich goes underground
The spectacle is not for the faint-hearted, when in the forest twilight bats get out of the viewing slots of old pillboxes and armored caps, swarming and squeaking. The winged vampires decided that people had built these multi-storey dungeons for them, and settled there long ago and securely. Here, not far from the Polish town of Miedzyrzecz, is home to the largest colony of bats in Europe - tens of thousands. But this is not about them, although the military intelligence chose the silhouette of a bat as its emblem.
There have been legends about this area, they are going and will go on for a long time, one more gloomy than the other
“Let's start with the fact,” says Colonel Alexander Liskin, one of the pioneers of the local catacombs, “that near a forest lake, in a reinforced concrete box, an insulated outlet of an underground power cable was found, instrument measurements on the veins of which showed the presence of an industrial current of 380 volts.
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Soon the attention of the sappers was attracted by a concrete well, which swallowed the water that fell from a height. At the same time, the intelligence reported that, possibly, the underground power communication goes from the direction of Miedzyrzec. However, the presence of a hidden autonomous power plant was not ruled out here, and also the fact that its turbines were rotated by water falling into the well. 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 all sorts of traps, including mine. It was said that somehow a drunken foreman on his motorcycle decided to take a dare for a ride through a mysterious tunnel. More reckless driver was not seen."
What for?
Any investigation of a mysterious object goes under the sign of this question. Why was the giant dungeon built? Why are hundreds of kilometers of electrified railways laid in it, and a good dozen of all kinds of "why?" and why?"
A local old-timer, a former tanker and now a taxi driver named Józef, took a fluorescent lamp with him and took us to one of twenty-two underground stations. All of them were designated once by male and female names: “Dora”, “Marta”, “Emma”, “Berta”. The closest to Miedzyrzec is Henrik. Our guide claims that it was to his platform that Hitler arrived from Berlin, so that from here he could go on the surface to his field headquarters near Rastenberg - "Wolfschanze".
This has its own logic - the underground route from Berlin made it possible to secretly leave the Reich Chancellery. And the Wolf's Lair is only a few hours away by car.
Jozef drives his Polonez along a narrow highway southwest of the city. In the village of Kalava we turn towards the Scharnhorst bunker. This is one of the strongholds of the Pomorsky shaft defensive system. And the places around are idyllic and do not fit with these military words: hilly copses, poppies in the rye, swans in lakes, storks on the roofs, pine trees burning from the inside with the sun, roe deer roam.
WELCOME TO HELL
A picturesque hill with an old oak at the top was crowned with two steel armored canopies. Their massive smoothed cylinders with slots resembled Teutonic knight helmets, "forgotten" under the canopy 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 pressurized door was cut into a third of an ordinary door and several air intake openings, again taken away by armored shutters. They were the gills of an underground monster. Above the entrance, an inscription, sprayed with paint: "Welcome to hell!" - "Welcome to Hell!"
Under the watchful eye of the machine-gun embrasure of the flanking 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 is looking into your chest - a frontal battle. "I entered without a pass - get a gun fire," says her empty, unblinking gaze. This is the chamber of the entrance vestibule.
Once upon a time, its floor treacherously fell through, and the intruder flew into the well, as was the practice in medieval castles. Now it is securely fastened, and we turn into a narrow side corridor, which leads into the bunker, but after a few steps is interrupted by the main gas lock. We leave it and find ourselves at the checkpoint, where the guard once checked the documents of all those who entered and kept the entrance hermetic door at gunpoint. Only after that you can enter the corridor leading to the battle casemates covered with armored domes.
One of them still has a rusty rapid-firing grenade launcher, another housed a flamethrower installation, the third housed heavy machine guns disguised emergency exit.
One floor below - depots of consumable ammunition, a cistern with a fire mixture, a chamber of an entrance trap, it is a punishment cell, a sleeping compartment for a duty shift, a filter-ventilation partition … houses. The flashlight beam illuminates the water at the bottom of the mine. A concrete staircase descends along the shaft with steep narrow flights.
“There are one hundred and fifty steps,” says Jozef. We follow him with bated breath: what's below? And below, at a depth of 45 meters, there is a high-vaulted hall, similar to the nave of an old cathedral, except perhaps assembled from arched reinforced concrete. The shaft, along which the stairs wound, breaks off here in order to continue even deeper, but already like a well, almost to the brim filled with water.
Does it have a bottom? And why does the mine overhanging it rise up to the casemate floor? Jozef doesn't know. But he leads us to another well, narrower, covered with a manhole cover. This is a source of drinking water. You can even now scoop.
I look around the vaults of the local Hades. What did they see, what was happening under them? This hall served as a military town with a rear base for the Scharnhorst garrison. Here in the main tunnel, like tributaries to the channel, two-tier concrete hangars "fell". They housed two barracks for a hundred people, an infirmary, a kitchen, warehouses with food and ammunition, a power station, and a fuel storage.
Trolley trains also drove up here through the airlock gas-mask chamber along the line leading to the main tunnel to the Henrik station.
- Shall we go to the station? - asks our guide.
Józef dives into a low and narrow corridor, and we follow him. The footpath seems to be endless, we have been walking along it at an accelerated pace for a quarter of an hour, and the light at the end of the tunnel is not visible. And there will be no light here, as, indeed, in all the other "holes of the earthworm".
Only then I notice how chilled I am in this cold underground: the temperature here is constant, both in summer and in winter - 10oС. At the thought of under what thickness of the earth our gap-path stretches, it becomes completely uncomfortable. The low vault and narrow walls squeeze the soul - shall we get out of here? And if the concrete floor collapses, and if water rushes? After all, for more than half a century, all these structures did not know any maintenance or repair, they hold back, and yet they hold back both the pressure of the bowels and the pressure of water …
When the phrase “Maybe we’ll come back?” Was already spinning on the tip of his tongue, the narrow passage finally merged into a wide transport tunnel. Concrete slabs formed a kind of platform here. This was Henrik Station - abandoned, dusty, dark …
Immediately I 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 easy to believe that the rails of this rusty two-track run up to the Berlin metro.
We turn into a side passage. Soon puddles flooded underfoot, and drainage grooves ran along the sides of the walkway - ideal drinking bowls for bats. The beam of the lantern jumped upward, and above our heads a large living cluster, made of bony-winged half-birds, half-animals, stirred. Cold chills ran down my spine - what a dirty trick, however! For nothing, that useful - eats mosquitoes.
They say that the souls of the dead sailors move into 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 1945 in the Mezeritsa underground, is still hiding from the sunlight in the form of bats.
Get away, away from here, and as soon as possible!
OUR TANK - OVER THE BUNKER
To the question "why was the Mezeritsky fortified area created", military historians answer as follows: 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 protect the borders of the Celestial Empire from the invasion of nomads for thousands of li. The Germans did almost the same, erecting the Eastern Wall - Ostwall, with the only difference that they built their "wall" underground.
They began to build it back in 1927 and only ten years later finished the first stage. Believing to sit out behind this "impregnable" shaft, the Hitlerite strategists moved from here first to Warsaw, and then to Moscow, leaving captured Paris in the rear.
The result of the great march to the east is known. The onslaught of the Soviet armies was not helped by the anti-tank "dragon teeth", nor the armored dome mounts, nor the underground forts with all their medieval traps and the most modern weapons.
In the winter of 1945, Colonel Gusakovsky's fighters broke through this "impassable" line and moved directly to the Oder. Here, near Międzyrzec, the tank battalion of Major Karabanov fought with the "Dead Head", which burned down in its tank.
No extremists dared to break the monument to our soldiers near the village of Kalava. It is silently guarded by a memorial "thirty-four", even though now it has remained in the rear of NATO. Its cannon looks to the west - to the armored dome of the Scharnhorst bunker.
The old tank went into a deep raid of historical memory. Bats circle over him at night, but sometimes flowers are placed on his armor. Who! Yes, those who still remember that victorious year when these lands, dug by the "earthworm" and still fertile, again became Poland.